Touchstone Tools and Resources

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost. --Lloyd Douglas

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a fourth barrier to organizational memory which should be mentioned. Spurred by their legal departments, a few American corporations are adopting a policy of "organizational amnesia": the systematic destruction of all unneeded personal notes and documents at regular intervals. The thinking behind this policy is that, in the event of litigation or criminal prosecution, it is dangerous for anything to exist in writing which could be used against the corporation. Since the legal mechanism of "discovery" allows lawyers from the outside access to any documents that are not explicitly protected under "client attorney privilege," the risk of expensive judgments against the corporation may have created an economic incentive for amnesia.

Such thinking, where it exists, creates a major obstacle for the creation of organizational memory. It insists that only the most formal and sanitized forms of knowledge may be allowed to persist. It puts everything that is written down or stored in a computer under the lens of "can this information possibly be used against us." Most adults know that you learn the most if, when you make a mistake, you acknowledge it and reflect on what you have learned from it. But in an organizational amnesia environment, mistakes must be avoided at all costs, and denied if they occur. How can organizational learning possibly take place in this environment?

Time will tell whether this kind of anti-memory policy is cost effective in the long run, and whether companies that pursue it can compete as knowledge organizations. Of course, following the guidelines in this paper, one could still practice being explicit about informal knowledge, creating a display system to enhance shared understanding, but then simply erasing that display (and all records and copies of it) at regular intervals. This temporary display would at least promote shared understanding on a project, but not long term nor between-team memory.

To summarize, the obstacles to an effective organizational memory system fall into two categories, cultural and technical. The cultural barriers include the following: a cultural emphasis on artifacts and results to the exclusion of process; resistance to knowledge capture because of the effort required, the fear of loss of privacy, the fear of litigation, and the fear of loss of job security; and resistance to knowledge reuse because of the effort required, and the low likelihood of finding relevant knowledge. The technical barriers include: how to make the knowledge capture process easy or even transparent, how to make retrieval and reuse easy or even transparent, and how to ensure relevance and intelligibility (i.e., through sufficient context) of retrieved knowledge.

So far we have considered the obstacles for creating an effective organizational memory. Part Two offers a solution to the problems outlined above, provides a brief theoretical justification for it, and gives some examples of its application. The solution offered expands the design space for organizational memory systems.

In our search for how to design an effective organizational memory system, it is worthwhile to consider, as metaphors, the operation of three other information processing systems which possess long term memory: computer architecture, human cognition, and living cells. This leads to a theory about the missing link in organizational memory.

Figure 2: Simple model of computer memory

Computer memory basically has two components, in addition to the processor (see Figure 2). The processor works directly with RAM (Random Access Memory), and the disk (or network) is used for long term storage of data (Note 15). The important feature of this model is that RAM mediates memory. The processor only works with data stored in RAM. All data must be read from the disk into RAM, where it is processed, changed, or displayed to the user. Similarly, any data that must be kept between "processing sessions" must be stored on the disk, and must go through RAM to get there. Nothing gets into or out of the disk without going through RAM.

Current theories about human memory tell a similar story. In the simplest model, human memory has two components: Short Term Memory (STM, sometimes called Working Memory) and Long Term Memory (LTM). Of course, there is the component of cognition that corresponds to the computer processor: Processing (see Figure 3). (I call it "Processing" because I want to sidestep such questions as "Is there a processor?", "Where in the brain is the processing taking place?", etc.) STM participates directly in cognitive processing (e.g. thinking, reflecting, acting, and so on), but its size is very small (Note 16). LTM is used for permanent "storage" of information and experience.

Figure 3: Simple model of human memory

Again, the point is that STM mediates memory. To "commit something to memory" is to focus processing on it in STM with enough repetition that a permanent trace of it is created in LTM. To "recall something" is to bring it from LTM back into STM. Nothing gets into or out of LTM without going through STM.

Figure 4: Simple model of cellular memory

Life has a long term memory, as well: genetic information stored in the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. Here, again, the mechanism by which the genetic information is accessed involves an intermediate store. In this case, RNA mediates memory (see Figure 4). All of the cell's metabolic functions (the "processing" in this system) are performed by proteins. The blueprint for the structure of each protein, i.e. its sequence of amino acids, is stored in the DNA of the cell, but is not retrieved directly from the DNA. Instead, the DNA is "transcribed" into a complementary molecule called RNA. The RNA is then used as the template from which the proteins are manufactured. And again, nothing gets into or out of DNA without going through RNA (Note 17).

Figure 5: Pattern of mediated memory in information systems

Thus, there seems to be a pattern for memory in which there is some kind of fast, flexible intermediate store (Note 18) between the processing component of these information systems and their stable long term memory (see Figure 5).

However, virtually all implementations of organizational memory are structured without the short term store-we attempt to move information directly from the immediate work process directly into storage (be it bookshelf, file cabinet, or computer database), and directly from storage into the work process (see Figure
6).

Figure 6: How organizational memory is currently implemented

The problem with this approach is that, in the pattern, the short term store performs at least two important functions: it provides the processing element with a well-defined information focus (a small and discrete subset of long-term storage), and it provides a staging ground which structures and indexes the information for long-term storage.

Figure 7: Proposed model of organizational memory

One could object that, in the prevailing model, organizational memory has an operational short-term store which is the desktop or computer screen of whoever is accessing the organization's long-term memory. That person may have taken a document off their shelf or out of the corporate library, or they may be looking at a document on-line, or they may be reviewing the results of a search they have performed in some database. But these examples really just illustrate information moving directly from long term storage into the work process, without any intermediate structure or store. Also, these examples only illustrate retrieval of formal knowledge items by a lone individual. In the terms of the pattern for memory systems, there is currently no structure which mediates between knowledge work and the organization's vast memory (see Figure 7). The central proposal of this paper is that an effective organizational memory system requires a structure that functions as an "organizational short term store."

It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore why it is that memory seems so often to use an intermediate store, but this pattern may be helpful in our design efforts. What do we need, by metaphorical extrapolation, to create and use an "organizational short term store" that mediates organizational memory? This structure would have similar criteria to those of STM, RAM, and RNA:

There may be even more criteria for a mediating short term store. The essential point is that our efforts to design an organizational memory system should be informed by the design of other kinds of memory systems.

What sort of structure might act as an organizational short term store? I propose that a special kind of shared display for team meetings called a display system fits the criteria. A display system has three components: capture of information into the system, a structure by which the information is organized, and a representation and display of that information, usually to a group. A simple example is a checkbook register: by recording checks you capture the information in the system; the structure includes date and amount of the check, and who it is written to, but not, for example, where you were when you wrote the check; the display in this case is the register itself.

A display system for knowledge teams may use flip charts, white boards, overhead projectors, or computer projection systems for the display, and their structure may be as simple as a list of brainstormed items or a calendar, or as complex as a causal loop diagram or process model. The specific display system presented in this paper has the following components:

These are the properties of any display system, as defined here. The main purpose of a display system for knowledge teams is to facilitate the thinking and learning of the knowledge workers as they meet over time to discuss and solve wicked problems. The secondary purpose of such a display system is to serve as the interface to the organizational memory, so that their informal (and formal) knowledge is transparently captured, and previously captured knowledge is easily recalled. To fulfill this secondary purpose, the display system must have one more property:

The approach to creating an organizational memory system I am advocating is the creation of tools and practices for transparently mediating between knowledge work and the organizational knowledge base. Since this is a large innovation, an evolutionary approach is called for, and this one has three steps.

First, give knowledge workers a display system (i.e., the Short Term Store in Figure 8) that immediately improves the quality of the knowledge work process and removes some of the recurrent frustrations of meetings, such as lack of clarity and rigor in decisions, rehashing the same ideas, reopening closed decisions, hidden agendas, lack of clear results, politics, and so on.

Figure 8: First step in evolutionary design approach

Second, connect the display system to the organizational computing network (the organization's Long Term Store) so that display maps can be preserved and shared among different people, teams, and sites (see Figure 9).

Figure 9: Proposed model of organizational memory

Third, develop the practices and advanced technologies that (i) transparently index and store informal knowledge captured in the display system, and (ii) retrieve relevant chunks of informal knowledge as they are needed by users of the display system.

Ultimately, it will be important to have effective storage and retrieval mechanisms that connect the short term store to the organization's long term memory on the corporate computer network. But these technologies are not a prerequisite to gaining the many short term benefits of a display system. Moreover, the biggest challenge in introducing an innovation as sweeping as an organizational memory system is the general slow speed of organizational culture change. By starting with using a display system for the short term store, we start early on the part of the system that will take the longest to implement.

The notion of display system for a team is not new, it just hasn't been used much for the kind of creative knowledge work that this paper is focused on. Air traffic controllers have their radar screens, stock brokerages have the "big board," a doctor's office has a shared appointment book, and a football team has the downmarkers, the clock, and the scoreboard. Each of these is a display of key information that is changing frequently and must be shared by everyone on the team.

A central assumption of this paper is that most knowledge work happens in groups, and that group work is largely conversations. If this is true, then it would seem natural, and indeed compelling, for workgroups to adopt display systems that support and enhance their conversations.

Generally, the closest knowledge teams come to using a display system is to use a flip chart or white board during a meeting, or to write up and distribute the minutes of their meetings. While these are a start, the flip chart and white board have neither the detail nor structure to create much shared understanding, nor do they serve the cause of memory. Meeting minutes create a memory trace, but do little to create shared understanding.

The breakthrough I am proposing here is to treat the process of knowledge work-especially the informal knowledge that comes out in conversations and meetings-as a critical and valuable asset, and to capture it in a way that facilitates. For example, it means respecting what each person is saying by capturing the essence of their statement in a display system for everyone to understand and appreciate. By doing this, the facilitator brings the group to a practice of listening carefully to each person's point. In a strong sense, the use of a display system institutionalizes listening as a vital and honored part of the group work process.

Although such a practice may seem a far stretch from the way people interact with each other in most corporate meetings, the short term payoffs can make it self-reinforcing. One of the most common objections to this level of rigor in meetings is that it takes too long; but, once teams have experienced it, they realize how much time they have been spending in repetitive and tangential discussions-and the true economies become clear. Since meetings constitute much of the work process in a knowledge organization, meeting process improvement is a high leverage opportunity. Also, there are technological ways to make these process improvements, such as use of a display system, nearly transparent-only a small shift from current practices.

In addition to better shared understanding, there is a shift in dynamics that happens when a group commits to really listening to each other. The sense of collegial mutual respect increases, and power plays and petty politics diminish. The use of a display system creates a shared sense of thinking and learning together, as opposed to determining who has the right answer. Debate and conflict can still occur, but the chance of getting stuck in that mode is much smaller. Creative thinking and learning is what is worth hearing and capturing. The playing field becomes more level and the implicit message becomes "the most important game here is learning together."

To summarize, the use of a display system for the informal knowledge in meetings and teamwork makes the knowledge explicit, improves shared understanding in the team, and shifts the dynamics from adversary to inquiry. The display system also functions as an organizational short term store, and is thus an essential stepping stone to designing an effective organizational memory system.

Display systems consist of capture, structure, and display. The choice of the structure depends on what aspect of knowledge needs to be made explicit. For example, process modeling (Rummler, 1990) makes the inputs, steps, decision points, and outputs of an organization's processes explicit, while causal loop diagrams (Senge, 1990) make causal relations and feedback loops explicit. Since we are designing organizational memory, a good starting point for what to make explicit is: What do organizations routinely forget that they most need to remember? One answer might be documents and data. There is already a very strong interest in, and some tools for, finding (or not losing) this kind of formal knowledge. But remembering formal knowledge alone is not enough, and won't have much impact on organizational learning.

My answer to the question 'what do organizations need to remember' is: decisions and the knowledge surrounding them (Note 19). That is, we must capture the decisions, the rationale behind each decision, the open questions related to the decision, the assumptions behind it, and any related supporting information. Admittedly, these things are only a part of the informal knowledge being created in a knowledge organization, but they are a critically important part, especially in an organization that is engaged in any sort of planning or design (Note 20).

It turns out that these elements of decisions and decision making are all neatly handled by a conversational model developed in the early 1970's, called IBIS (Kuntz & Rittel, 1972; Conklin & Begeman, 1989). IBIS (short for Issue-Based Information System) classifies all of the points in any creative conversation into four simple elements: questions, ideas, pros, and cons (Note 21). Although this structure is simple enough to be easy to learn and use, it is surprisingly powerful. All of the major components of informal knowledge can be concisely expressed in IBIS, including ideas, facts, assumptions, definitions, questions, decisions, tradeoffs, guesses, inferences, and points of view. Creative conversations can be captured and rendered in terms of a web of IBIS questions, ideas, and pros and cons, yielding a vivid map that makes the structure of the conversation explicit. There are other models that serve for other aspects of informal knowledge (e.g. action work flows, Toulmin diagrams), but IBIS is the best we have found so far for creative conversations.

Here is an example of the power of IBIS for knowledge work. In a one year field test, a five person software team working on a commercial product used IBIS as the structure of their design meeting minutes. In the background they kept track of the effort that they put into capturing the IBIS minutes, typing them into the computer, and keeping them organized. In the process of reviewing the IBIS record, they found 11 errors in the software and its specification. They were able to calculate that by finding these errors when they did, they saved between three and six times the cost of documenting their design thinking in IBIS (Conklin & Burgess Yakemovic, 1991). In other words, the documentation effort more than paid for itself in process improvement and attendant cost savings. It is difficult to get empirical measures like this in a commercial setting, but this result clearly shows that statements like "capture is too expensive" or "it takes too long" are simply wrong, at least in the case of capturing the process of creating large knowledge products.

IBIS is an excellent structure for display systems, because it is easy to learn and use, it can represent nearly everything that gets expressed (Note 22), it does not require the meeting participants to change their behavior, it exposes assumptions, rhetoric, and hand waving, and it creates shared understanding by letting everyone see how their ideas and positions relate to everyone else's.

Of course, even a single meeting can produce a large number of IBIS elements. QuestMap™ (Note 23) is a computer tool for capturing and managing any size of IBIS map (see Figure 9), and any number of interlinked maps, among large numbers of users. QuestMap is thus one of the first in a new generation of computer tools that support the process-not just the products-of the knowledge team's daily work. As conversations are captured and stored in QuestMap, the organization begins to accrete a memory of informal knowledge, linked within itself (using hypertext links) as well as with any related documents that are on the corporate network. Moreover, it is not necessary to meet to create IBIS maps. Knowledge workers sitting at computers in their offices can conduct "virtual meetings" in which issues are raised, discussed, and resolved. To our knowledge there are no other commercially available hypertext tools which support capturing meeting conversations in IBIS (Note 24).

Figure 9: A sample QuestMap screen

Continuity from Meeting to Meeting

We (Corporate Memory Systems, Inc.) facilitated a series of planning meetings for a utility industry group. We used QuestMap to capture the key points in the meeting conversation and a display projector to display the QuestMap screen on the wall so that everyone could see it. At each meeting the maps we created corresponded to the main agenda topics for that meeting, such as "By-law changes," "Budget," "Dues," and "Who is the customer?" At one meeting one of the specific issues in the dues discussion was "What are the criteria for the dues formula?" The group explored this question and came up with three criteria. At the next meeting several months later, during the discussion of dues, the question about criteria came up again. The group started to rehash the question, but within a few seconds the QuestMap facilitator had navigated to and pulled up the map from the previous meeting onto the shared display.

After reviewing what they had said before, the group added some new criteria to the list. Then they were able to return to their discussion of dues, confident that they had not wasted any time and that they were back up to speed with their earlier thinking. In this case, the retrieval process was transparent to the group - except for their delight at the power of effortlessly reusing informal knowledge. The time between meetings of a workgroup can be as little as a few hours and as long as a year or more; organizational memory must handle the smaller "remembering events" at least as well as the larger and longer-term sort.

Virtual Meetings Add Rigor, Save Time

An environmental planning division at an electric utility company explored and resolved a complex problem with only two formal meetings, one at the beginning and one at the end, during the two month project span. In this group every workstation had QuestMap installed on it, and the staff used it for "virtual meetings" in which the conversations took place electronically, as with an electronic bulletin board. At the beginning of this project to remove a contaminant from a site, the group manager was faced with choosing between an existing cleanup effort that was projected to go on for many years and had cost $15 million so far, and a new experimental treatment that would remove the contaminant much faster but would cost $8 million to implement, and was not guaranteed to succeed. After the initial meeting, the project team used QuestMap to explore the pros and cons between these two options.

Although some members of the staff favored going ahead with the experimental treatment, the existing field data was inconclusive, and the manager proposed (in QuestMap) that they do a pilot (i.e., reduced scale) project to reduce the risk. The staff studied the proposal and reported back that the experimental process would not work if scaled back to a pilot level. The manager probed a little deeper. Over several iterations, all in QuestMap, the staff went off and did more research, but each time came back with reasons that the pilot would not work. And each time the manager would push back on some piece of their reasoning, exposed in the QuestMap map, and ask "Yes, but did you consider this?" or "Is this really true?"

At the end of two months the staff did come up with a very clever solution: it involved building a reduced scale version of the treatment system, and using plumbing that would have to be installed anyway if the experiment failed and the existing cleanup system had to be continued into its next phase. A final face-to-face meeting was held, and the decision was made to proceed with the pilot project. The team had conducted an extended and rigorous analysis of the problem with very few face-to-face meetings. As a bonus, they had a complete record of the research and rationale that led to the decision.

A Creative Solution plus Project Memory

The environmental affairs group at a large electric utility had been working hard on a wicked problem involving a new substation. The company already owned the site for the substation, but a species of bird had been found on the site that was about to be listed as endangered by the Department of the Interior. There were also some very messy politics involving apparent dealings between the county and a local developer. All of the options of what to do so far had some major drawbacks. The team sat looking at the QuestMap map of the problem for a while, then someone quietly said, "I have a crazy idea: why not give the property to the U.S. government?" After some exploration, the team agreed this was a reasonable solution to pursue-definitely an "outside the box" idea. Perhaps the use of a display system contributed to the creativity of this solution.

After a flurry of activity the environmental group came up with a recommendation for management. Things died down, but six months later a new development caused the whole issue to come back up to "Condition Red". The group was able to go back to their QuestMap maps of the project and quickly come back up to speed on all the options and information. By adding some new information, and updating some existing items, they could now clearly see what the best option was for the current circumstances. A new course of action was adopted, and this, too, was captured in the group's memory.

Workgroup computing ("groupware") tools take an important step in the direction of facilitating knowledge work, and their databases inherently create some degree of organizational memory. But such tools also can-and do-create mountains of incoherent rubbish. The problem is that, to avoid the attic-full-of-stuff syndrome, knowledge must be organized and indexed as it is being captured, without creating a burden to the people who create it.

The story I am telling in this paper can be summarized as follows:

Once a team or organization has recognized the value in its informal knowledge, and has begun to capture and manage it appropriately, it has the key raw ingredients of organizational memory. GDSS has direct experience, through our clients, of the value of this memory for a team when they come back later and need to take up where they left off. Of course, as the size of the organization-and its memory-increases, new problems of scale emerge that are both technical and cultural in nature. The good news is that the short term pay off from using display systems can pay for the cost of implementing them, thus paying for the next step toward a complete organizational memory system.

I am very grateful to Michael Ayers, Tobin Quereau, Bill Weil, Al Selvin, Simon Buckingham Shum, Robert Conklin (my dad), Mike McMaster, and Kai Brown for the comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Conversations with Joe Griffith and Faith Flores were essential in fleshing out the STM/LTM metaphor.

1 The ideas expressed in this introduction are borrowed directly from "The Age of Social Transformation," by Peter F. Drucker, in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1994.

2 The term "organizational memory" is sometimes used to refer to whatever exists today in the way of social conventions, individuals' memories, etc. In this paper the term refers to a new capacity for organizations, an augmented memory that is based on information technology.

3 This is analogous to operating a lumber mill as if the wood chips and sawdust were a waste product, to be hauled off and burned. By changing the process, for example, by gearing up to produce particle board, the mill might create a new product, thus capturing the value inherent in the wood chips and sawdust.

4 In general, wave phenomena, such as informal knowledge, compassion, and community, are regarded as being less real. This is beginning to change as we deepen our understanding that a quality product can only be produced by a quality process.

5 Some word processors allow electronic "annotations" to be made to a document, but these are more like "optional footnotes." To this author's knowledge, this capability is not widely used for teamwork.

6 The current solution-document management systems-does a better job of organizing the formal documents, but still relies heavily on search as the mechanism for finding things. Without the help of context, brute force search become less effective as the number of stored documents grows. The web of contextual relationships to other documents is also lost, or mostly lost.

7 Decision rationale and other forms of informal knowledge must be tightly integrated with the artifacts of concern-each one relies on the other to make sense. Moreover, there must be a smooth transition in both directions. Because people do orient to the artifacts of their work, the relevant informal knowledge must be indexed and accessible directly from those artifacts.

8 Some recent research suggests improved technology for capturing and indexing video clips of project history and rationale (Carroll et al, 1994; Minneman et al, 1995), but the fundamental challenge of indexing all of these snippets remains.

9 For an account of one project historian's experience, see (Shum et al, 1993).

10 This paper focuses on the technology issues, not the issues of changing culture. But I believe that technology innovation and culture change efforts must be designed to synergize with each other. For a discussion of a culture change approach that is consistent with the ideas in this paper, see (Eppel & Conklin, 1995).

11 Some readers may be concerned that formalizing the "soft stuff" like this can, in the process, destroy it. This is always a risk with language, but the approach I propose below respects the need for inconsistency, incompleteness, ambiguity, and all of the other "messy" qualities of the rich process of human communication. In particular, this approach does not seek to formalize or quantify the decision-making process.

12 Traditional wisdom dictates a linear, or serial, problem solving approach: (1) define the problem, (2) gather the data, (3) analyze the data, (4) formulate a solution, (5) implement the solution. Ideally, you visit each of these steps once, using the output of each step as the input to the next.

13 The process of relevant recall may be quite active: more like reconstruction than retrieval. For more on this, see (Bannon & Kuutti, 1996).

14 The "byte" is the standard measure of amount of information these days. The Bible is about ?? bytes, while the Library of Congress contains ?? bytes of text and pictures. In contrast to this, large corporations can easily have ?? bytes of text, numerical, and picture information in their corporate computer systems.

15 Strictly speaking, the processor in this case is a program, the short term store is the program's data structures, and the long term store a file or database on the disk or network.

16 Cognitive scientists believe the size of human STM is about seven "chunks," plus or minus two, depending on expertise and other factors. The contents of an STM memory chunk can be quite complex, but it must be a single thing-it must have enough internal coherence that it only takes up one chunk. The concept of "tigers" is complex, but in a list of animals it only takes up one STM chunk.

17 Life also uses RNA as an intermediate in "storing" new information, but the story is a bit more complex. Briefly, organisms "remember" by successfully creating offspring; at the moment of conception, RNA is used to bind the DNA strands from each of the parents into a new DNA pattern, the blueprint for the offspring.

18 In computer science terms, memory that serves this function is called a "cache."

19 A decision is a final conclusion or choice, a point of commitment to a certain idea or path.

20 The entire engineering field of design rationale is based on the importance of focusing on and supporting the decisional aspect of informal knowledge. An excellent overview is Carroll & Moran (1995).

21 Rittel termed these "issues," "positions," and "arguments." We have given them slightly more intuitive names.

22 The primary exception is action items (e.g., promises, requests, etc.).

23 QuestMap™ is available from the Soft Bicycle Company, Inc. in Washington, DC. Current information is available at the SBC Web site: http://www.softbicycle.com

24 There is a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool called MetaEdit+ which supports design conversations about the structures being designed using a variation of IBIS (Oinas-Kukkonen, 1966).

Bannon, Liam J., and Kari Kuutti (1996). "Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory: From Storage to Active Remembering," in Proceedings of the 29th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-29), Vol. 3, I.E.E.E. Press.

Carroll, J. M., Alpert, S. R., Karat, J., Deusen, M. S. V., & Rosson, M. B. (1994). "Raison d'Etre: Capturing Design History and Rationale in Multimedia Narratives," Proceedings of ACM CHI'94 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 192-197), ACM: New York.

Conklin, Jeff, and Michael Begeman (1989). "gIBIS: A Tool for All Reasons," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 40, 200-213.

Conklin, Jeff and KC Burgess Yakemovic (1991). "A Process-Oriented Approach to Design Rationale," Human-Computer Interaction, 6, pp. 357-391. Also in Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use (1995) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NY.

Conklin, E. Jeffrey (1993). "Capturing Organizational Memory," in Proceedings of GroupWare '92, D. Coleman (Ed.), Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 133-137, 1992. Also in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, R. M. Baecher (Ed.), Morgan Kaufmann, 561-565. Also at Capturing Organizational Memory.

Drucker, Peter F. (1994). "The Age of Social Transformation," The Atlantic Monthly, November 1994.

Eppel, Richard, and E. Jeffrey Conklin (1995). "Blending Cultural Transformation and Groupware to Create a Learning Organization," in GroupWare '95 San Jose Conference Proceedings, D. Coleman (Ed.), The Conference Group, Scottsdale, Arizona, pp. 265-276.

Kuntz, Werner, and Horst Rittel (1972). "Issues as elements of information systems," Working Paper No. 131, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley.

McMaster, Michael D. (1995). The Intelligence Advantage: Organising for Complexity. Knowledge Based Development Co Ltd, Douglas, Isle of Man, UK.

Minneman, S., Harrison, S., Janssen, B., Kurtenbach, G., Moran, T. P., Smith, L., & van Melle, W. (1995). "A Confederation of Tools for Capturing and Accessing Collaborative Activity," Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia-95 Conference, ACM: New York.

Moran, T.P. & J.M. Carroll, Eds. (1995). Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Oinas-Kukkonen, Harri (1996). "Debate Browser - an Argumentation Tool for MetaEdit+ Environment," Proceedings of The Seventh European Workshop on Next Generation of CASE Tools (NGCT 96), Crete, Greece, May 1996.

Rummler, Geary (1990). Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.

Senge, Peter (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday Currency, N.Y.

Shum, S., MacLean, A., Forder, J., & Hammond, N. V. (1993). "Summarising the Evolution of Design Concepts Within a Design Rationale Framework," Adjunct Proceedings of InterCHI'93: IFIP/ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Addison Wesley, Amsterdam, pp. 43-44. Also available at ftp://kmi.open.ac.uk/pub/simonb/interchi93.ps.

Copyright © 1996 Group Decision Support Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

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