Knowledge Management, Organizational Memory and Organizational Learning

We began the Organizational Memory (OM) mini-track at HICSS-27. The purpose was to “provide a forum for information systems and other related researchers and practitioners to share ideas and theories about organizational memory and organizational memory systems.” This forum proved highly successful generating more than 30 papers over a 5-year period, including some that were later revised and published as part of a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce. While interest in the concept of OM has increased over the decade, its manifestation as Knowledge Management (KM) in the practitioner domain limited the types of research that were submitted to the mini-track. In response to this trend, we renamed the minitrack as Organizational Memory and Knowledge Management. Based on feedback from last year’s session participants, we have further expanded our scope this year to include Organizational Learning (OL). It is evident that OL can not be easily separated from the concepts of OM and KM. However, the nature of submissions to this year’s mini-track made it clear that KM and KM systems are the key focus items within this research domain. As was the case last year, we received fourteen paper submissions, and accepted nine papers for presentation in three sessions. The first session includes three papers that focus on defining knowledge and knowledge management and on testing the concept in a variety of ways: by observing use of a prototype KM system, by designing an architecture for a KM system, and by observing KM in organizations. The first paper, "Turning Tacit Knowledge Tangible," by Dick Stenmark, argues that structures can be developed to tap into an individual’s tacit knowledge – knowledge that we know but cannot explain. Stenmark reports the results of a study that examined how individuals used a prototype “recommender” system to capture and visualize professional interests within an organization. The second paper, "Multi-Perspective Enterprise Models as a Conceptual Foundation for Knowledge Management Systems," by Ulrich Frank, takes a pragmatic view of knowledge. It defines a set of requirements for a system that manages knowledge. These requirements then are used to describe an architecture for a KM system. The third paper in this group, “Knowledge