THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON ORGANIZATIONAL

MEMORY

GORDON B. SCHMIDT & TAYLOR SCHENK

IPFW

SOUTHERN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

OCTOBER 27TH 2016

OUTLINE

-Organizational Memory/ Why is it important

- Technological impact on organizational memory

-Metaknowledge

- Impact of social media

-Power of Forgetting

- Future Directions

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

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

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

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

• Ex. Google, team members, departments

• Lessens cognitive load of individuals

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

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 with search engines we store information on how

to search for it, rather than info itself

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

• Ex. Search engines, Google, Reddit, YouTube

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