Organizational Memory Systems: Challenges for Information Technology

Organizations subsist on communication and coordination. An organization’s ability to remember and learn from its past, in other words, its ability to use its “organizational memory” has been around for centuries as a means of learning, exchanging and accumulating knowledge to help the organization realize its objectives. Organizational memories are generated and used in communities of practice with little, if any, explicit effort devoted to their development. Information technology offers the promise of helping to build and use such organizational memories. For the most part, however, this promise is unrealized. In this paper, we explore why this is so and consider the challenges to developing and maintaining organizational memories.