In 1987, Sandelands and Stablein portrayed organizations as "mental entities capable of thought. " Argyris and Schon [1978] regard this construct as a metaphor -- that organizations do not literally remember. However the storage component attributed to social groups is characterized, this collective "memory," combined with supporting mnemonic functions for its appropriate applications, has been termed "organizational memory. " Since collective memory is clearly a social construct, any Organizational Memory System must support the human interactions necessary to best capture, retain, and retrieve organizational information in a manner that it is most likely to increase future effectiveness. The paper explores impacting fields as human memory, communication and knowledge transfer, group and team processes, and organizational learning. Characteristics in these mechanisms create a perceptual "distance" between the end-user of the stored knowledge the initial participant. This distance is logically compressed in the OM model and further described as a modification of Morrison's [1993] '(Team Memory" model, creating a descriptive construct representation of OM.
Citation:
Mark Weiser, "Organizational Memory: Reducing Source-Sink Distance," hicss, vol. 2, pp.271, 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Volume 2: Information Systems Track-Collaboration Systems and Technology, 1997