Story Management Technologies for Organizational Learning

The stories told among members of an organization are an effective instrument for knowledge socialization, the sharing of experiences through social mechanisms. However, the utility of stories for organizational learning is limited due to the difficulties in acquiring stories that are relevant to the practices of an organization, identifying the learning goals that these stories serve, and delivering these stories to the right people and the right time in a manner that best facilitates learning. In this paper we outline a vision for story-based organizational learning in the future, and describe three areas where intelligent technologies can be applied to automate story management practices in support of organizational learning. First, we describe automated story capture technologies that identify narratives of people’s experiences within the context of a larger discourse. Second, we describe automated retrieval technologies that identify stories that are relevant to specific educational needs. Third, we describe how stories can be transformed into effective story-based learning environments with minimal development costs.