Biological and Information Systems Approaches

INtrODUctION Knowledge of past activities, discoveries, and events is applied by businesses to support everyday operations in much the same manner that human beings use their personal memories. But the true nature of organizational memory (OM) remains obscure, and information-systems practitioners have no clear definitional model of what they are working toward and have been unable to build a convincing organizational memory system (Olf-man, 1998). Having apparently reached a dead end, OM studies have been subsumed into knowledge management (KM) research as a subsidiary field. OM research is currently focused on the faculties of an organization that are capable of storing knowledge perceived or experienced beyond the duration of the actual event. Researchers and practitioners in the field use a definitional frameworks and models of organizational memory derived from flawed models of aggregate human behavior used in earlier sociological studies (Frost, 1942; Wilson, 1998). Models derived from earlier sociological studies rarely consider the exact nature and sources of commonplace thinking and memory use, and focus on highly visible and significant behavior and activities. Rapid theoretical and technological advances made in psychology research, brought about by the advent of sophisticated technological aids, have disparaged and largely disproved many of the naive systemic models of human cognition developed by earlier social scientists and were incorporated into information-systems sciences in the early years. Before we consign the hope of deeper knowledge of business memory to the " too hard basket, " it might be fruitful to examine an alternative path to understanding the nature of organizational memory and its application: The impersonal and generalized models of business activity (and cognitive operations) inherited from social sciences have not proved fertile, but the individual Biological and Information Systems Approaches and personal models of memory and cognition found in biological and related sciences offer some promise in light of recent advances.