What is the Use of a Corporate Memory?

What is the use of a corporate memory? Why is there an industrial interest in corporate memories?

Macro perspective

At the macro-perspective, I understand key uses of corporate memory to be:

1. To enable and support a gradual change of the way people in an entreprise work from a functional-oriented discipline (e.g., marketing dept. or engineering dept.) to a project-driven, cross-functional work (e.g. customer-centered or concurrent engineering projects). Through a corporate memory, there does not need to actually take place a business reengineering process. The existing organization can be maintained (although, a functional-oriented organization is likely to cause overheads and unnecassary inefficiencies). The corporate memory is a resource that supports intermediate steps towards a gradual re-organization.

2. To support improvement and enhancement of the available expertise/competence of (in) a company such that new projects (that previously could not be addressed) become challengeable. Expertise/competence improvements can be achieved by stressing ``learning''. A corporate memory enables management of the expertise available in the company to stimulate learning through: expertise transfer, cross-project fertilizations, stimulation of creativity by encouraging dynamic project setup and coordination, and through distributed control.

3. To enable and support the formation of virtual corporations; Corporate memories (or only aspects of it) can be shared among enterprises to mutually inspect and consult their key competences. Based on these key competences, temporal alliances among enterprises can be investigated and formed to increase their scope of competence to tackle new projects (which cannot be realized by each enterprise individually) and/or to quickly reply to market opportunities.

Micro perspective

At a micro-perspective, the use of a corporate memory is to benefit from previous experiences in the company to improve the quality and efficiency of project development/service efforts and to support dynamic opportunistic project management and coordiation.

1. Through the use of design rationales and design history from projects pursued in the company, a project team can make their design process more efficient and effective. The availability of design rationales and design history enables the reuse of analyses and lines of reasoning in previous projects. This widens the solution space that can be explored during the design process with the same resources which, in the end, is likely to result in a better customer satisfaction. Design rationales and histories provide the same benefits for the projects in which these structures are created.

2. Traditional project management and coordination boundaries are relaxed, if not replaced, to enable and support a dynamic opportunistic project management and coordination. This way, project teams are empowered and can respond quickly to customer requests and feedback. Some of the changes that can be achieved through a corporate memory are:
   • Traditional project organization (based on task decompositions and project roles) can replaced by dynamic and self-organizing project teams.

   • Traditional project management (based on central control and hierarchical authority relationships) can replaced by self-sufficient teams which are enabled and empowered to make decisions and to quickly respond to changes and opportunities.

   • Traditional (iterative, waterfall-like) project control can replaced by a customer-driven control exercised through the evolving customer-needs and the exploration of the implications of alternative design decisions.