Organizational memory: a preliminary model based on Insights from Neuroscience

Abstract

[Excerpt] Much has been said about collective intelligence and the tools to achieve this. However, there is no existing framework for understanding how people collectively and seamlessly, store, reason and apply knowledge to act more intelligently. In this paper we present the Reconstructive Organizational Memory (ROM) model is intended as a starting point to define a framework that can support the development of information technology tools that can effectively support organizational cognition. More than a collection of knowledge repositories of different natures, organizational memory is the very process of updating these repositories and applying collective experience. Understanding this process as a distributed and continuous organizational capability by which meaning is assigned to the past and the collective future is projected is essential to design organizational interventions to improve how organizational actors collectively make decisions and behave. (...)