Technology shapes organizational memory by providing computer programs, databases, the cloud, social media, and external archives to store knowledge and make it accessible, facilitating the distribution and passive viewing of knowledge; it also allows organizations to forget detrimental information through purging outdated data while maintaining what remains relevant through collaborative tools like wikis. The future includes refining social media, limiting irrelevant knowledge, integrating communication research, and optimizing memory storage systems.

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