Barriers to Actualizing Organizational Memories: Lessons ... - CiteSeerX

Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2000

Barriers to Actualizing Organizational Memories Lessons from Industry Karma Sherif and Munir Mandviwalla Department of Computer and Information Sciences Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122

Abstract 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 Systems .

1.0 Introduction Organizational memory (OM) is a relatively new area of study, in which research tends to focus on definitions of the term ([21], [19]) and on the content and types of OM ([1],[10],[14],[21]). There have been few studies on the effects of OM on organizational effectiveness [8], the role of information technology (IT), and on the adoption and use of an OM and organizational memory information system (OMIS). Organizational Memories have been described as repositories that acquire and retain information with the objective of disseminating it within the organization [3]. Walsh and Ungson [21] view organizational memory as a construct, rather than a concept that helps members analyze current decisions in light of past experiences. They maintain that OM exists beyond individual memory and includes organizational culture, work processes, social and physical structures, and external archives. An OM can be in the form of articulated knowledge as stored

in corporate manuals, databases and files or in the form of tacit information delineated by experiences, beliefs and values. Research in OM has been concerned about past experiences, goals, rules, accepted behavior, innovations, best practices and standard procedures that can be brought to reflect on future decision making ([14], [1], [10]). An OM can assist decision makers draw analogies to past decisions, define problems, generate ideas and evaluate alternatives. An OM can exercise control by enforcing desired behavior and standards. Some go even further to suggest that OM bestow social order on organizations to the extent that they believe that memory makes organizations. Several researchers have stressed the role of IT in developing an Organizational Memory Information System (OMIS) to support the mnemonic functions of acquisition, retention, search, retrieval, and maintenance. Such functions serve as the basis for other effective functions of integration, goal attainment, pattern maintenance, and adaptability [12], [29]. Given the strong storage, analytical, and retrieval capabilities of IT, an OMIS can help members critically analyze a range of concrete and abstract corporate data. Sophisticated search engines are capable of filtering different types of data in limited time spans. Communication and networking also allow corporate information to be accessible to members in different time and space harnessing the process of organizational learning. OMIS has also generated interest as a structure for shortening the decision-making life cycle and reducing cost. While scholarly interest in OMIS has been growing, we still know very little about how organizations will adopt and use an OMIS. It is important to understand the issues impacting usage given the shared assumption that OMIS adoption will involve changes to the work-life of organizational members as well as to the organization as a whole. The research in this paper suggests that by shifting the focus away from the spirit of OMIS, to understanding the individual and organizational beliefs underlying OMIS adoption, we may be able to inform theory and systems development activities as well as provide managers

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with valuable insights on how to leverage their knowledge assets.

cases helps define the scope of the theory and broaden its explanatory and predicting power [7].

2.0 Research Method

2.1 Research Design

The goal of this study is to ground theoretical explanations for how organizations adopt OMIS by qualitatively analyzing the process. The objective is to build a grounded theory [9] of OMIS adoption based on the beliefs of organizational stakeholders and organizational structure about the role and potential use of OM. The primary research question is to identify the concepts that underlie adoption of an OMIS. Given the missing gaps in OM literature, case research was indicated as the appropriate method for achieving the purpose of this research. The grounded theory methodology for qualitative research was chosen to guide the data collection and data analysis of cases studied. As Daft and Lewin [5, p. ii] explain:

A multiple case study approach was adopted to gain an in-depth understanding of the adoption of organizational memory. This study focuses on software-development departments in four different organizations that adopted Lotus Notes to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing. The goal of each project was to build an organizational memory that developers could reference as part of delivering solutions to customers. The studied organizations include oil and gas, telecommunication, and two software consulting cases. The names of all the units studied and their respective organizations have been masked to protect their confidentiality. The four departments are described in further detail below: Case 1: The Energy Solution Group (ESG) at SCC -- a leading software consulting firm. ESG develops accounting systems for customers in the energy industry. They realized the importance of capturing best practices and reusing them to develop applications at a fast rate. Case 2: The Customer Billing Systems (CBS) at TCC -- a worldwide telecommunication firm that provides local and long distance services to customers worldwide. Several attempts have been launched within the organization to capture corporate knowledge and disseminate it among the different information seekers within the organization. . Case 3: OGC an Oil and Gas Company (OGC) that operates worldwide. The department studied developed software solutions for refineries and chemical plants operation. Case 4: The client server computing group at ITS -- a leading software consulting firm with offices in thirteen states. The client servercomputing group provides solutions to telecommunication companies.

"By studying organizations, scholars can build grounded theories incorporating new variables and insights as they increase their own expertise, and write up the result." Case research used for this effort is particularly suitable for problems where research and theory are at early stages of formulation [2]. The methodology focuses on collecting experiences mainly through interviews. The purpose here is to identify the most important constructs viewed by practitioners to effect the phenomenon under study. In contrast with logically deduced theories that are common in empirical research, grounded theory focuses on generating a theory from the data collected during the length of the study. The theory provides a set of propositions that can be empirically tested. Glaser and Strauss [9] believe that an induced theory is often more useful than deduced theories: logically deduced theories based on ungrounded assumptions, such as some well-known ones on the “social system” and on “social action” can lead their followers far astray in trying to advance sociology. However, grounded theories, which take hard study of much data, are worth the precious time and focus of all of us in our research, study and teaching. The process of generating a theory from the data implements the comparative analysis method, where data collected from different sites is compared to identify theoretical properties of different concepts involved and relationships among them. Comparing the similarities and differences between the different

As suggested by other IT adoption studies ([15] [18]), we focused on two embedded units within the organization: individuals affected by the adoption process and the organizational context in which the concept is being applied. Three stakeholders were identified from the literature and initial industry contacts, as key players in the adoption process: contributors to OM, users of OM, and upper management. For each case, the individual beliefs of the three stakeholders regarding OM and their perspective as to why barriers occur were examined. In line with other organizational design and development research [6] [17] and the discussion earlier we also focused on

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structural elements that might underlie the organizational readiness to adoption including (see Table 1 for the initial list of questions): strategies such as fit with organizational goals, resources, and cultural issues such as receptivity to information sharing, reuse of knowledge, and norms of collective achievement. During the course of the study, the researchers alternated between data collection, coding, and data analysis to decide on new sources of data required for grounding the theory. The above questions were originally formulated using a start up list of concepts identified from the OM literature. These constructs were used to guide the research in formulating a protocol for the interview and not as an a priori explanation of the issues that underlie OM adoption [7] [12]. Glaser and Strauss [9] warn against prior specification of constructs because of the danger of forcing the constructs on the data. However, we agree with Eisenhardt [7] who states that: A priori specification of constructs can also help to shape the initial design of theory-building research. Although this type of specification is not common in theory building studies to date, it is valuable because it permits researchers to measure constructs more accurately. If these constructs prove important as the study progresses, then researchers have a firmer empirical grounding for the emergent theory.

2.2 Data Collection Multiple sources of evidence were gathered to encourage “converging lines of inquiry.” In addition to structured interviews with open-ended questions, we also gathered archival data such as articles, promotional material, and Internet World Wide Pages. Different stakeholders were interviewed to provide rich information at different levels of abstraction. The goal was to “slice vertically through the organization, obtaining data from multiple levels and perspectives.” [13] A set of discussion points were posed at the beginning of the interview to allow the interviewee to freely express beliefs and their relation to personal experiences. Thirty-three interviews were conducted for the five cases. Twenty-nine of the interviews were taped and transcribed. The remaining four interviews were not taped because the interviewees declined being taped. Extensive notes were taken during all interviews to mark contradictions with information gained from other sources including the literature. Similarities were also marked.

Each interview led to a refinement of the list of questions as new concepts emerged from the data. A number of follow-up interviews were conducted to collect data on concepts that were ignored in the original interviews. Such an approach is common in grounded theory development and enhances the level of analysis [7]

2.3 Data Analysis The data analysis started with the transcription of every single interview. Researchers' comments were inserted in the background of each document. Figure 1. Model to Explain the Impact of Individual Beliefs and Organizational Context on OMIS Adoption

QSR NUD*IST software was used to categorize Individual Beliefs Knowledge Application

Knowledge Currency

Knowledge Codification

-

-

Knowledge Sharing

+

-

Knowledge Communicability

+

OMand OMIS Adoption

+ Culture

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-

Knowledge Distribution

Knowledge Synthesis Function

+

Policy on Use of Distributed Knowledge

Tool

Organizational Context

the components of each interview. The package allowed the transcribed interviews to be imported as text files and subsequently each interview was browsed and every sentence categorized under one or more of the emerging categories. This process of coding is known as open coding in grounded theory methodology [20]. The focus was to compare and contrast the underlying issues that impact adoption of OM.

3.0 Research Findings The comparative analysis of the data collected from all four sites resulted in a model that revealed a consistent set of concepts that underlie OM adoption and use. The model suggests that barriers to the creation and use of an OMIS exist mainly in individual beliefs and misconception about the utility and ease of capturing expertise and disseminating it across organizational boundaries. Moreover, issues such as reluctance to share information, organizational culture, and tools defy traditional wisdom and support adoption. Barriers are indicated

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in the figure by negative symbols while the positive symbols indicate concepts that support adoption.

everyone’s knowledge. To that’s a waste of time. Manager

me

3.1 Individual Beliefs We found that there was surprising consistency in the belief structure of the four organizations. The mainly cognitive level beliefs are described in this section as a series of “optimistic” and “skeptical” convictions about OM and OMIS. In general, the stakeholders across the four organizations expressed a deep knowledge codification skepticism when discussing the role of OMIS. The stakeholders believed that it is hard to capture experts' knowledge because of the difficulty of expressing and capturing tacit knowledge. It’s just kind of an informal knowledge. There are some people that have worked in some project areas for a long time, so they have just become the domain experts, but we’ve never really documented that. User of OM My brain anyway works in an unstructured manner. I don’t understand how or why I came up with certain solutions. A lot of times there are just no reasons why I thought of a specific issue. So the bottom line is not knowing how to explain to someone the way I go about making decisions, the way I go about solving problems. Contributor to OM (expert) The knowledge codification skepticism was reinforced by a knowledge currency skepticism. Given the frequency and magnitude of change that an organization has to go through the stakeholders expressed doubts about the currency of any knowledge that could be captured and disseminated. To me codified knowledge is static information, unless you update the repository, otherwise it’s not accurate. And the reason why we keep documentation to a minimum is, unless you can guarantee that it is up to date, documentation is worthless. Unless you keep your knowledge assessment up to date, it’s worthless. You can’t count on it. So if it only happens once a year, I think why do it. It’s not worth the trouble. And to me it would be hard to justify having a staff member that’s all he does on a year around basis is to update

Managers in all four organizations acknowledged the knowledge currency skepticism but asserted that if the assets in the OMIS are specifically created for application in different situations then they can be adapted to fit new contexts: We know we are going to be responsible for making changes later and, so that’s a good motivation for trying to do things in a way that will make it more adaptable to change. But you definitely have to think for a little long term. Manager However, the suggestion above implies additional work in trying to structure the information so that it is usable in the future. The question, however, is how. There are no methodologies for creating reusable knowledge assets. Some stakeholders contended that the formation of a multidisciplinary team can help create reusable assets that can surpass the test of change. Overall, the knowledge codification and currency skepticism may lead organizations confronted with turbulent stimuli to be less motivated to invest time and resources in sustaining a structured reusable OMIS. Projects started with good faith may lose steam when the stakeholders believe that changes will be immediately reflected on the work processes, rendering old ways of doing business obsolete: When an organization is changing so much, there’s very little chance that certain processes that are in place will be carried over to the new organization. So the dynamics of an organization could also affect the stability of a knowledge library. User of OM The two forms of skepticism were further reinforced by a knowledge application skepticism. The stakeholders believed that applying codified knowledge would be difficult due to their belief that codified knowledge would be so specific to the original contact that it would be useless in other contexts. They articulated different but related thoughts on how the original creator was needed to practically apply the knowledge: No matter how much you codify it, the actual application of knowledge is still going to be very difficult. User of OM

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I think what happens more is a mentoring process that goes on. Somebody gets really good at an area, then they take other people who are newer to it and they try and help them up the learning curve so it would be reasonably effective. But I’ve never seen anybody actually try and kind of put an expert system in place to help other people to capture the knowledge of somebody else. Manager

training classes and other things anyway. Manager

Usually within the organization things are so hectic that people realize that they’re not going to be able to read over some expert’s knowledge. I’m assuming you gather an expert’s knowledge because you’re documenting it. In a lot of cases with the hectic schedules, people don’t have a lot of time to read over certain expertise in certain areas. If experts are needed on a project, they are going to be asked anyway to go work on that certain project and be available as a whole. User of OM

They derive their sense of value from being able to learn quickly, being bright individuals who are also very well adapted to a social environment. In addition to that, when a new individual comes into a culture where information sharing is done so freely and they see that no one is being penalized for sharing information, in fact it increases their popularity, it increases what others perceive their value to be, then that also seems to harbor the tendency to share information. Manager

In contrast with the three forms of skepticism (codification, currency, and application), the stakeholders expressed optimism about knowledge communicability. They believed that the OMIS systems could facilitate information exchange between seekers and experts rather than serve as complete “bins” of knowledge. They felt that the OMIS in place facilitated communication between members and that knowledge seekers could take the initiative to find information from a specific knowledge creator. This view is in alignment with the claim that organizational learning is a social phenomenon that is positively correlated with rich media. Accordingly, knowledge seekers always felt the need for face to face communication to support learning from facts stored in OMIS databases. The stakeholders also expressed optimism about the personal value of knowledge sharing. This is in contrast with the literature, which expresses doubt about the desire of organizational actors to share knowledge [19]. Experts in all four organizations thought that knowledge sharing would increase their value in the organization: Most of the experts are pretty secure in their position. As time goes, their knowledge grows and you never really capture it all. They impart it all the time through

You become more valuable when you’ve transferred that knowledge. You now have freed up more mental space to go store more information, and you’re learning curve is much shorter as you know more. User of OM

3.2 Organizational Context The previous section focused on the important cognitive and belief aspects underlying the adoption of OMIS. In this section we focus on structural and organizational design issues that arose out of the study. Organizational development research strongly believes that knowledge management and sharing initiatives will result in learning only when organizations intervene to modify elements of their structure such as division of labor, power structure, coordination mechanisms, and networks of informal relationships ([16] [17]). We found that the stakeholders were skeptical about the knowledge distribution mechanism and the organizational policy regarding use of distributed knowledge: You've got distribution barriers. How do you make people aware that knowledge is out there and should be leveraged? How do you make that a part of their daily job where they go out, and before they do anything around a particular area, they go out and look for things that they can leverage rather than starting from scratch. Manager

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The mechanisms for sharing information readily are not in place. I think that’s something needs to be fostered and nurtured by management teams over periods of time. User of OM Contributors to OM often remarked that there was no formal methodology for synthesizing and aggregating the bulk of knowledge residing in the shared databases making it hard to learn from experience accumulated outside their immediate group. Users of OM complained that information available through the knowledge base is not at a level of abstraction that would redeem its reuse within different contexts. In addition, there was no attempt taken to consolidate different pieces of information within a domain to build a coherent domain model that members can rely on as a frame of reference: A lot of the elements that comprise the database are very line specific to [one of their customers]. We have made it available to some of the other projects and subsequently lost connection with those other projects with respect to how they are using that same database and how they are modifying it. Some effort could probably be spent to go and reconsolidate all the different copies of this that are out there and develop maybe a cohesive, complete version of the same data base. Project Manager We need to concert our effort in developing some sort of effective process or methodology or whatever you want to call it to allow people to actually build things that are reusable, principles to follow when you’re doing analysis and design and also construction of components that are reusable. I think that’s the biggest barrier. OM contributor The lack of a methodology to systematically process information into high level abstract design that can be easily adapted to different situations, makes it hard to adapt and apply such knowledge to different situations. Thus organizational members often go through repeated cycles of compiling information in shared databases to reuse it in a new context. The lack of defined roles and responsibilities to support mnemonic functions of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing add further complication to the knowledge synthesis issue. With the increasing

workloads and the growing trend in decentralization, the responsibility of consolidating information becomes an overhead. The lack of specific roles for Knowledge Management (KM) causes OM stakeholders to view KM as an additional burden to existing workloads. Several developers interviewed justified their reluctance to spend time on abstracting information to support its use by other groups saying: Outside the group it gets a little more difficult. Time is chargeable. I can say I’m working and couldn't take three hours away from my client and the work that I’m supposed to be doing to go help someone who has nothing to do with my client. Time becomes an issue of chargeability, who’s paying for that, and is it causing you to neglect your client? OM contributor I don't think people have time in some cases to share information unless they’re in a close knit functional group to communicate what’s going on, to share in some of the things that are going on. User of OM Information sharing becomes more difficult at a departmental level because you end up having project teams that are so concentrated on working on their own projects, trying to deliver their actual software piece. We don't really allow that much time for developers to work on solutions so that they can be shared across the whole department. Manager The above concerns about the need for a method to synthesize and aggregate knowledge and the reluctance of the organizational stakeholders to take on this role suggests that there is a gap between what managers may think is needed to propagate the reuse of knowledge and what users believe is required. Information Systems designers may need to consider how this knowledge synthesis function will be addressed in OM projects. The above distribution and policy doubts and concerns about the knowledge synthesis and distribution functions underlie the suspicion of many stakeholders that that the initiative behind organizational learning is not a priority for top management: A lot of these things have good intentions but they never get off the ground because people just don’t have the time and management is

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never dedicated. If management really believes that knowledge management is important, they would have dedicated someone to the cause and made that part of a job description and performance evaluation on that particular topic. That if they really want something changed. User of OM The skepticism about the aforementioned elements of organizational structures is in contrast with the optimism that the stakeholders felt about the tools. Beside automating the process of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, tools provide a convenient way of storing large volume of knowledge assets in a structured way that would render easy and quick retrieval of the assets. All stakeholders were very enthusiastic about the tool (Lotus Notes). Their skepticism seemed to come from a belief that memory was idiosyncratic and tied to specific contexts and would stay that way since there was no methodology for synthesizing and aggregating knowledge. They felt that the tools were very effective in disseminating information but not in structuring it. In summary, most of the developers believed that tools would play only a marginal role in the adoption of OMIS. These results are in contrast with efforts to build better OMIS. Finally, all of the stakeholders interviewed in all four organizations asserted that the culture of their organizations fully supports information sharing and knowledge creation. In other words, they expressed optimism about the organizational culture with respect to knowledge sharing while questioning the cultural values of other organizations:

organizations to cut back on the necessary changes required to build an effective infrastructure to sustain the effort. Organizations need to focus on educating its members on ways of developing knowledge assets and the application of these assets to different contexts to be able to build an organizational design that support the development and usage of an OMIS. Such training will need to go beyond simple tool introduction. It requires a strategy to effectively cope with the individual misconceptions that organizational members share and reinforce through organizational culture. It will also involve educating managers and employees on how to organize and disseminate reusable knowledge. Additional structural elements include modifying organizational roles and restating job descriptions to stress the importance of knowledge creation and knowledge. An interesting finding of the study shows that the existence of barriers to an OMS had no adverse effect either on decision outcomes like the cost, time and quality of a decision or an effect on organizational learning. The existence of mentoring systems to complement a semi functional OMIS clearly mediated the negative effect of individual beliefs and environmental changes. In all four organizations there were active mentors that played the role of a human OMS. The project mentors taught developers certain ways of doing things performing more of an experience based information dissemination as opposed to just knowledge based dissemination.

I think that’s a trait that we foster and nurture within our organization, with our people. I don't think sometimes the various customer sites I’ve worked in, fully support it. Manager

4.0 Conclusion In a study of four organizations that adopted Lotus Notes to develop an organizational memory information system, evidence from the data collected suggests that there are a number of misconceptions that constrain the adoption of such tools and stifle efforts to push it forward. Such beliefs regarding the feasibility of codifying expert knowledge, the currency of information stored in shared databases and applicability of codified knowledge to different contexts have caused members of the studied

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