For proper knowledge management, organizations must consider how knowledge is kept and reused. The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed cognition analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding the calls, and the memory used in the work activity. Drawing on the work of Star, Hutchins, and Strauss, the paper focuses on issues of applying past information for current use. Our work extends Strauss’ and Hutchins’ trajectories to get at the understanding of potential future use by participants and its role in current information storage. We also note the simultaneously shared provenance and governance of multiple memories – human and technical. This analysis and the theoretical framework we construct should be to be useful in further efforts in describing and analyzing organizational memory within the context of knowledge management efforts.
setting:: telephone hotline group (HLG) for human resources (e.g., benefits, personnel policies) in a well-established mid-sized (~1000+ employees) company in Silicon Valley
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main participant whose transcript is analyzed (here called the HLG employee) was an experienced agent who had been at the company for 5 years, and at the hotline group for 1 year
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lit-notes
[observation-notes]
A HLG employee drew on five discrete “small memories” in her handling of a hotline call, such as the telephone system’s short-term memory of the group’s activity, her own short-term memory, scrap paper, the CAll Tracking (CAT) system, and records in the CARL database, instead of a single monolithic memory
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To properly deal with a discrepancy in benefits from the caller, a HLG employee needed to [reuse] information from the CARL database, among other sources of information, to create an escalation to the benefits group. To do this, she needed important [context] that was missing from the CARL record itself, such as details of the record’s creation or maintenance (was it authoritative?), and any circumstances surrounding the caller’s employment. The HLG employee dealt with this missing context by consulting an expert (a senior agent) and her own memory, rather than searching databases for additional information, even though that information could in principle be in there.
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The issue at play in one of the case studies was that the caller was trying to use benefits from her health care coverage, but was blocked by the provider, even though she (correctly) believed that she has coverage through the employer. This was borne out in the company’s CARL database, but her record was absent in the provider’s db. The HLG employee’s task was to resolve this discrepancy, and
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#References
Title: Organizational Memory as Objects, Processes, and Trajectories: An Examination of Organizational Memory in Use
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