Organizational Memory

1. THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY ON
ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
GORDON B. SCHMIDT & TAYLOR SCHENK
IPFW
SOUTHERN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION
OCTOBER 27TH 2016

2. OUTLINE
-Organizational Memory/ Why is it important
-Technological impact on organizational memory
-Metaknowledge
-Impact of social media
-Power of Forgetting
-Future Directions

3. THE PAST OF ORGANIZATIONS IS
IMPORTANT
•Effects what organizations do
• What is considered possible
• What blindspots
• What the organization stands for
• How things are done

4. ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
• Knowledge stored by organization that can impact how the
organizations makes decisions (Walsh & Ungson, 1991)
• 3 major considerations
• Where memory is stored
• Processes of obtain, store, retrieve
• Meaning for organization

5. TECHNOLOGY CAN SHAPE ALL 3 OF THESE
PROCESSES
• Computer programs
• Data bases (The Cloud)
• External archives like the Internet
• Social Media
• We examine how technology impacts Organizational
Memory

6. METAKNOWLEDGE
• Who has relevant knowledge or skills
• Ex. Need specific programming knowledge skills for a
project
• Often “knowledge fog”
• We know someone with knowledge but don’t known
that they know
Component of Transactive Memory Systems
• Distributed knowledge
• Knowing where knowledge is found is as important
as actual knowledge

7. SOCIAL MEDIA IMPACT
• Building communication visibility (Leonardi 2014)
• Less withholding of information
• Passive viewing of knowledge
• Social media makes information easier to access
• Directly and Indirectly
• Everything in one place
• Enterprise social media

8. MEMORY STORAGE
•Where organizational memory information is kept
•Technology can be a place to store information
•Wikis
• Store important organizational information that can be
revised
•External Storage
• Internet can have relevant information- Google it!
• Sparrow et al. (2011)
• With ease of access search engine we store information
on how to search for it, rather than info itself

9. ORGANIZATIONAL FORGETTING
• Purging information that is no longer
relevant or is detrimental to the
organization
• New tech for good = maintaining
information and ridding itself of
information that is wrong
• Ex. Wikipedia
• New tech for bad=making inaccurate/embarrassing
information easier to find

10. FUTURE DIRECTIONS
• Continual refining of social media tools
• Techniques to limit irrelevant knowledge resurfacing
• Collaboration with communication research for
progression of organizational memory construct
• Refining the design of the memory storage systems