An organizational memory for facilitating knowledge: an application to e-business architecture

Our economy is increasingly dependent on knowledge. Organizational memory (OM) contains knowledge that companies need to manage. This paper proposes a knowledge facilitating organizational memory (KFOM) to decipher a harmony mechanism of OM from the Oriental Yin and Yang perspective. KFOM clarifies an architecture to catapult the OM to organizational effectiveness. This architecture is made up of two layers: storage layer and facilitation layer. Storage layer represents task and domain knowledge. Facilitation layer identifies the harmony mechanism for utilizing knowledge. This harmony mechanism leverages the knowledge chain with agent, collaborator, transactor, object and registry facilitators. In order to demonstrate its practical usefulness, we explore how KFOM can sharpen an international e-business technical standard. Furthermore, an extension to a real-life B2B collaboration project for Korean steel and automotive companies confirms that KFOM can lead to business practices which most knowledge-oriented companies can adopt. q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.