Barriers to Actualizing Organizational Memories: Lessons from Industry

Organizational memories have been touted recently for their potential to enhance decision-making processes within organizations. Several organizations have acknowledged the importance of these knowledge structures and developed new organizational roles to manage them. Though a number of companies have been successful in creating and maintaining functional systems of organizational memory, data collected from four organizations suggests that there are inherent barriers within organizations that constrain both the development and maintenance of these repositories. This paper focuses on identifying the concepts underlying the adoption process and potential barriers that might have a negative short term impact on usability or a long term effect on the institutionalization of Organizational Memory