Tools for Organizational Decision Support: The Design and Development of an Organizational Memory System

Organizations, be they be global, multinational, or local, are finding that information technology is a powerful enabler of their business processes. IT management decisions therefore have profound impact on organizational performance. Such decisions then have qualitites that set them apart from other types of decisions (e.g., individual, group, etc.) and special considerations must be accorded to support these decisions. Recent studies of organizational decision support have brought forth the need to focus on organizational memory, its retention, retrieval, and use, as an effective support and coordination mechanism. Organizations retain memory among its individuals, culture, transformations, structure, and ecology, but it is the memory retained by the individuals that we find most conducive to systematizing. In our proposal, we describe a model for the retention and retrieval of organizational memory among the individuals. We propose to build a prototype of the system built around readily available offthe-shelf software whenever possible and field test the use of the system.