The article focuses on reexamination of
organizational memory. After nearly 10 years of research, organizational memory
(OM) has become overworked and confused. Burdened by a practical wish to reuse
organizational experience, researchers have often ignored critical functions of
an organization's memory in order to focus on only a few methods for augmenting
memory. In this article, authors investigate where memory exists currently
within an organizational setting, rather than focusing on potential technical enhancements.
In order to accomplish this OM is studied within a telephone help line that
answers human-resource questions at a well-established Silicon Valley company. This
problem is approached using distributed cognition theory. Authors begin with a
synopsis of the OM literature and the need for empirically based analyses of
OM. The OM Literature holds many varying and occasionally competing,
definitions. Intuitively, organizations should be able to retrieve traces of
their past activities, but the form of this memory is unclear in research
literature. A field study was conducted, which took place over a period of 18
months. A variety of data collection methods were Tracking system in which
agents record the content of their phone interactions