Systematically Diagnosing and Improving the Perceived Usefulness of Organizational Memories

The benefits of an organizational memory are ultimately determined by the usefulness of the organizational memory as perceived by its users. Therefore, an improvement of an organizational memory should be measured in the added perceived usefulness. Unfortunately, the perceived usefulness has many impact factors (e.g., the precision of the user query, the urgency with which the user needs information, the coverage of the underlying knowledge base, the quality of the schema used to store knowledge, and the quality of the implementation). Hence, it is difficult to identify good starting points for improvement. This paper presents the goal-oriented method OMI (Organizational Memory Improvement) for improving an organizational memory incrementally from the user’s point of view. It has been developed through several case studies and consists of a general usage model, a set of indicators for improvement potential, and a cause-effect model. At each step of the general usage model of OMI, protocol cases are recorded to pinpoint improvement potential for increasing the perceived usefulness. If improvement potential is identified based on the interpretation of the protocol cases, the user is asked for specific improvement suggestions. Since this is a continuous diagnosis of the usefulness of the organizational memory, this method can help to adapt the organizational memory to the needs of the users – even if the environment, for which the organizational memory was designed, changes.