Corporate memory

Every organisation, from its inception and throughout its existence, gathers knowledge about its business environment and about its internal operations. In most cases, this knowledge resides in the minds of the people which make up the organisation: the company direction may be held in the head of the CEO, while the correct way to process a claim form is maintained by finance clerks.

All of this information constitutes the organisation’s knowledge base. It may be considered a sort of ‘corporate memory’. Every structured group of people – from the local football club through to nations and global communities – has a corporate memory. In the former case it may be statistics and a set of stories about past greats. In the latter it is comprised of the history and cultural behaviours. In all cases this collective knowledge guides the behaviour of members.

However, the structure of most corporate memories is extremely messy to say the least. In many (most?) cases it is not formally structured or even recognised as a valuable resource. Pieces of information are scattered in many different brains and a thousand documents. Cross-connections rely on random coagulations of data by the members of the group and random associations based on past knowledge.

Entry into any group will always involve some induction or initiation procedure whereby one is introduced to the corporate memory. These processes go by such names as ‘training’, ‘induction’, ‘gaining experience’ and ‘mentoring’ [This is the subject of an entirely other field of study known as ‘teaching’]. There will also be some method for propagating knowledge amongst existing members, although this is commonly less controlled and often completely unmanaged. Compare how much organisational knowledge is gained through rumour and gossip as opposed to reading formal documents.

Mechanisms for passing on knowledge amongst existing vary greatly. There is some that is passed along in sound-bites; a mode designed to ensure that everyone in the organisation has at least a passing understanding. The corporate vision or mission statement is usually of this kind. [The fallacy in this is that just because everyone has heard the mission statement, company values or corporate vision doesn’t mean that they have understood or believe it. The normal response is to simply repeat the same statement it over and over again. Advertisers also use this approach with marginally more success.] At the other extreme are regulations and policies which may run to hundreds of pages – and which are rarely read.

As an organisation becomes larger and more established, knowledge is nailed down in a set of pre-defined processes and procedures such as templates, check-lists, instruction manuals or forms. All these may be considered as conditioned responses to specific stimulus by the corporate organism. Hence small or young organisations have less standard processes and procedures to define their actions. They have had less time or opportunity to learn and react to troublesome situations. On the other hand large organisations can go too far in this direction and institute so many hard and fast rules that they restrict any variation or flexibility away from THE fixed process. Deciding where and when tight rules are required and when loose guidelines should be implemented is not easy.

A formal knowledge base, attempts to resolve some of the issues surrounding the normal diffuse nature of the corporate memory. It does not (and cannot) expect to contain all the disparate knowledge which may be contained within the organisation. However, it should provide a first point of call for any member of a group to find out about anything relevant to the group.