[1] Falling under the wider disciplinary umbrella of knowledge management, it has two repositories: an organization's archives, including its electronic data bases; and individuals' memories.
Its importance to an organization depends upon how well individuals can apply it, a discipline known as experiential learning or evidence-based practice.
The actively encouraged flexible labor market has imposed an Alzheimer's-like corporate amnesia on organizations that creates an inability to benefit from hindsight.
The term has been defined variously by different experts: Alvin Goldman described it as justified true belief;[3] Bruce Aune saw it as information in context;[4] Verna Alee defined it as experience or information that can be communicated or shared;[5] and Karl Wiig said it was a body of understanding and insights for interpreting and managing the world around us.
Given the high levels of corporate amnesia in commerce and industry, some organizations are turning to new techniques to preserving their organizational memory and, in particular, their tacit knowledge.
The latest capture tools to get attention are the traditional corporate history, usually produced once or twice every 100 years as a public relations medium; and oral debriefing, an augmentation of the old-fashioned prescriptive and formulaic exit interview.
Oral debriefing, which concentrates on short- and medium-term memory, targets exiting and key occupant employees, recurring corporate events, and important projects in detailed testimony of participants.
Its permanent character also means that it does not have to be continually reproduced, just updated, and that its necessary re-interpretation alongside changing circumstances is predicated on a more reliable evidential base.
When it comes to experiential learning, an awareness of both the explicit and tacit components of organizational memory on their own is not generally enough to create new knowledge efficiently.
Most models of experiential learning are cyclical and have three basic phases: The concept's starting point[11] is that individuals or organizations seldom learn from experience, unless the experience is assessed and then assigned its own meaning in terms of individual and/or the organization's own goals, aims, ambitions, and expectations.