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Ronald C. Beckett: Ronald C. Beckett is General Manager at Technology and Innovation, Hawker De Havilland Ltd, Bankstown, Australia.
Introduction
Many organisations today are searching for ways to acquire knowledge that will yield a competitive advantage, and for ways to leverage the knowledge that they already have, to sustain a high rate of continuous improvement. The optimum outcome is to create a combination of practices that is difficult to emulate.
Any organisation, even a newly formed one, will have its own repertoire of practices and routines that reflect the purpose of the organisation and the prior experience of the people in it. And the longer an organisation exists, the more these will be associated with the organisation rather than the particular people in it. For example, most people have some concept of an Army that is independent of the people in it. Unique organisational knowledge will exist in terms of data collected externally and generated internally, routines melded by the operational environment, and relationships reflected in contracts, agreements and structure that may be considered independent of individuals. And when people come into a particular established organisation, they behave differently than in another environment, reflecting the norms that have developed over time, even though these may not be explicitly enunciated.
This leads to the notion of a "corporate memory". But how could this be characterised? And what would be the value of this characterisation?
Legal firm, Phillips Fox (1998) have captured the knowledge of senior lawyers utilising an information technology approach so that, combined with information from existing repositories inside and external to the firm, the time spent on case research has been significantly reduced. The approach has received awards for its innovative use of technology in the legal profession.
Recruitment firm Morgan and Banks identified both explicit and tacit knowledge that would have a significant impact on their business operations (i.e. critical knowledge), with a focus on enhancing relationships with clients, understanding the capabilities of its people, and evolving smart systems and practices (Whyte, 1997).
Experiences such as these already suggest a number of things: that some knowledge and data may be more important than other knowledge and data, that some of the "corporate memory" may lie outside the firm, and that the "corporate memory"...