Learning, memory and technology
Authors: Divitini Monica , Simone Carla 
Published: June 2007

The literature about organizational learning, and consequently about organizational memory, suggests various motivations leading an organization to consider these topics as part of its management strategies: among the others, improving the capability of handling exceptions, reducing the cost of the personnel turn-over, enhancing the consciousness of the organizational members about their dynamic context to improve creativity or positive attitudes toward cooperation. Even if these motivations can coexist in the same framework, each of them defines different requirements of the strategies and tools necessary to improve memory and learning along each specific dimension. Our first point is therefore that when speaking about memory and learning one has to make clear their scope within the organization. Otherwise, the argumentation becomes too confused and the possible strategies not fully comparable. Our focus on learning and memory is aimed at increasing people's capability to deal with new situations (like, e.g., exceptions and critical situations) in contexts characterized by dynamic demands coming from the organization and its environment. Moreover, our focus is on articulation work --i.e. on the additional activities that are required in order to coordinate, schedule, integrate, etc. cooperative activities-- more that on the domain specific work activities oriented towards the field of work (Schmidt and Simone, 1996)

As in the case of human beings, organizational learning is the outcome of some unconscious activities, that can be seen as a natural by-product of usual working practices and of conscious, even if not planned, activities which require a specific attention and effort. From a management point of view, the organizations that want to increase their capability of learning have to be prepared to pay a specific cost: in fact, conscious activities require a specific investment in terms of people and resources to make them happen. On the other hand, unconscious activities require a specific investment in terms of understanding the related mechanisms so that organizational strategies and technological solutions are not disrupting this background process. Our second point is that the definition of these strategies and solutions have to take into account learning as a constitutive part of the every-day activities in both of the above mentioned aspects. In particular, the design of the technology supporting the (cooperative) work has to take into consideration from the very beginning the aspects that are related to the associated learning process.

The next question is then: which is the possible role of the technology in the learning process? Our answer is driven by two basic considerations: first of all, the limited capability of the technology which is basically able just to recognize events and react to them in some way, and to store and retrieve some cluster of facts/pieces of information. Secondly, and in strict relation to the previous point, the fact that the exploitation of these capabilities does not imply anything about how human beings actually learn and maintain their memory. In the best case, technology is just a useful support.

Then the technology can support the learning activity by recording facts and information together with the context in which they happened or were produced, and by allowing a flexible reading of what has been recorded so as to support its continuous rediscovery. Moreover, the technology can trigger learning processes by increasing the awareness of relevant events. Of course, what is important to be recorded and what is a relevant event is context dependent, and is the outcome of some possibly implicit negotiation among the actors. Consequently, the technology can be supportive if it is open to this evolution both in relation to individual and group interests. This is a way to bridge the gap between individual and group learning (Cook and Yanow, 1993), by allowing for individual elaborations and for their collaborative integration.

In the following, we will focus on artefacts. These are, together with their meaning and the conventions related to their use, an essential component of the organizational memory. In order to understand how organizational memory can be organized to be effective for the organization, it is necessary, first of all, to understand how artefacts take shape, i.e. how they are developed and how they are given a meaning. Second, to understand how this meaning is shared through the members of an organization. In fact, interaction among people increases the sharing of experience about the work domain, while distributedness increases the opacity among the sub-groups that are dynamically constituted to cooperatively solve problems. Third, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms that allow individuals and (sub-)groups to keep their "
memory
" updated with the evolution of the organization.

In particular, we'll consider the specific kind of artifacts that emerge within work group in order to reduce the complexity of articulating cooperative activities --like, for example, classification schemes, time tables, and flight strips. Together with the artefact, a series of conventions and procedures are developed in order to describe its suggested/required use. Artefacts (with the related procedures and conventions) can be seen as the
actualization
of a learning process by the group that will use them. In this respect, artefacts constitute along term memory as they are the synthesis of past experiences that make explicit which information are relevant in a certain environment. Actually, procedures and conventions in this case can be seen as 'precomputations' that abstract from the very detailed description of what has to be done and only define a space of possible choices. These pre-computations can be considered as a source for the organizational memory, since they can be adopted by less experienced actors as a script, by more skilled people as a map, and in any case be adapted to the current situation (Suchman, 1987; Schmidt and Simone, 1996).

In their instantiated form, i.e. when they are used within a specific process, artefacts represent a "short term memory" for the (sub)group involved in the process or for members of the organization that need to be aware of its status.

The association of a meaning to artefacts and to the objects related to a working group is very complex. In fact, it is not possible to define
a prior
a knowledge that is
true
for every member of the group and in every context. The meaning is the result of complex social interactions, that is the product of a cooperative effort that can possibly make use of specific artefacts and precomputations in the sense mentioned above. In this perspective, we want to recall a previous study on the process of naming within a group (Divitini and Simone, 1994). This allowed us to point out that the naming of objects when people take commitments (and, more in general, the knowledge on these objects) is the result of the communication processes the different members of the group take part in. A sensible support to the cooperative effort can be conceived only taking into account these processes.

It is important to note that within a group is not always necessary (nor desirable) that all the people involved in a process share the same knowledge about it. Often, it is enough, in order to make cooperation effective, to reach a minimal consensus. The knowledge that each participant to the process must have deeply depends on her role, her responsibility, her pre-understanding of the situation. Communication tend naturally to increase the knowledge sharing. Moreover, communication can be activated as a reaction to the arising of misunderstandings, ambiguities, breakdowns. In these cases, people often use communication in order to solve them and make action possible. From this perspective, organizational memory, can provide a means to reduce some of this communicative overhead or to remedy to a contingent impossibility in the communication.