Our economy is increasingly dependent on knowledge. Organizational memory (OM) contains knowledge that companies need to manage. This paper proposes a knowledge facilitating organizational memory (KFOM) to decipher a harmony mechanism of OM from the Oriental Yin and Yang perspective. KFOM clarifies an architecture to catapult the OM to organizational effectiveness. This architecture is made up of two layers: storage layer and facilitation layer. Storage layer represents task and domain knowledge. Facilitation layer identifies the harmony mechanism for utilizing knowledge. This harmony mechanism leverages the knowledge chain with agent, collaborator, transactor, object and registry facilitators. In order to demonstrate its practical usefulness, we explore how KFOM can sharpen an international e-business technical standard. Furthermore, an extension to a real-life B2B collaboration project for Korean steel and automotive companies confirms that KFOM can lead to business practices which most knowledge-oriented companies can adopt.
Increasingly, it seems successful companies run on knowledge. As knowledge's presence have expanded, companies have come to view it as a resource ever more critical to their success. Most organizations work assiduously to manage organizational knowledge for competing in an unpredictable environment (Davenport et al., 1998, Liebowitz et al., 1998 and Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Organizational memory (OM) is critical for managing organizational knowledge. It contains actual knowledge that companies need to manage (Schwartz, Divitini, & Hersey, 2000). OM has been studied from a variety of fields such as digital library (Ackerman & Fielding, 1995), knowledge base and hyper documents (Euzenat, 1996), case-based decision support repository (Henninger, 1996), and knowledge base system (Liao, Hinkelmann, Abecker, & Sintek, 1999).
OM represents something more substantial than its contents. An effective OM should support tasks for managing knowledge (Schwartz et al., 2000). Forward-thinking OM needs to facilitate the interaction of organizational knowledge, i.e. the way knowledge is actually organized and utilized. This knowledge utilization is a continuous process whereby individuals or groups within a company share knowledge (Lee & Choi, 2003). Yet, it is difficult to clarify how OM utilizes organizational knowledge—both explicit and tacit knowledge. Previous studies focus on the contents—explicit, domain-specific and codified knowledge in isolation. Currently, only explicit knowledge is the province of information technology (IT). To run on knowledge in organization, the importance of tacit, personal, and implicit knowledge is increasing (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
The primary objective of this study is to decipher the OM architecture which can enhance the organizational effectiveness. For this purpose, this paper proposes knowledge facilitating organizational memory (KFOM) which delineates its harmonious mechanism for facilitating knowledge in the view of information communication technologies. This mechanism is fundamentally inferred from the Oriental Yin and Yang perspective. The core of its mechanism includes two layers: storage and facilitation. The storage layer stores the harmonious knowledge contents. The facilitation layer explores the mechanism for utilizing this knowledge in more competitive fashion. This facilitation layer includes five knowledge facilitators such as agent, collaborator, transactor, object and registry. Each knowledge facilitator brings forth its own knowledge and transfers its deliverables to others, which finally makes knowledge harmonious.
In order to demonstrate its usefulness, this paper applies KFOM architecture to a technical framework for e-business, electronic business eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML). This usefulness will be further illustrated by a real-life e-business collaboration project for Korean steel and automotive industries. This observation is important because the velocity of the new economy has created a competitive incentive among many companies to leverage their knowledge as a means of creating sustainable business value.
There is much that needs to be learned about the nature of knowledge facilitation. This paper has been a first attempt to pull together evidence from the Oriental Yin and Yang theory to explore the knowledge facilitation mechanism for OM. We propose an architecture for OM, involving two types of knowledge, namely task and domain knowledge. Five knowledge facilitators such as ACTOR are found to be critical to effective knowledge facilitation; these five facilitators ensure maximal leverage of OM. An illustrative case of business collaboration via the Internet confirms that our architecture can play an important role in successful KM.
The findings of this study should be considered in the light of its inherent limitations. First, like most previous architectures, ours may exclude some potentially important components. The emphasis of our architecture is on the knowledge facilitation processes affecting organizational effectiveness. Our study is exploratory using potentially significant variables. A further extension to other knowledge processes like creation or sharing would be of interest. Second, our exploration relied exclusively on the Yin and Yang theory. In spite of its applicability in the social science phenomena, it may limit the generalizability of our implications. Experimental tests would provide a clearer understanding of other roles and collaboration activities between heterogenous stakeholders. Finally, our case study deals with the e-business in isolation although multiple knowledge webs are involved. Although this case helps explore our architecture with considerable richness, it limits the wider acceptance of our findings. Further efforts are necessary to test it in other business settings. Furthermore, its impact on corporate performance would be of particular interest (Choi & Lee, 2003b).
