Corporate Memory

Corporate Memory

“Corporate Memory” is realized and hold by a group of people, which includes realities, concepts, experiences, and competencies. There is a need of continuous information sharing and pass, when transferring of the corporate memory to the individuals. We can easily see the “Corporate Memory”, in the companies, professional groups, government bodies, academic groups, religious groups and societies and in the extension of all cultures.

Coporate Memory is vital, in order to keep the ideology of a group or the way of working.

We see the the necessity of this memory, within the challenges of competiton and within the high circulations of our business life, different systems have been designed, stored and implemented in the companies in order to use the recallable information for a value in the future. The need for a memory is valid for the companies as well as the humans. Processes, procedures, traditions and values. These should be used to get a successfull future by transforming those to the strategies without looking at the past.

Different companies and organizations have spent large amount of money by building the infrastructure and systems to get the information, to create the corporate memory. But, it’s seen that there is no clean information in the repositories due to unorganization. There are two main reasons of this dirtiness. First, collecting of the information without doing any filtering; second, recording of the found data in a single repository.

In order not to see this dirtiness, the important things are;

i.) Collecting of the data and its method,

ii.) Keeping the dynamics of the information which may change in time,

iii.) Understandability of the information that will be used,

iv.) The use of reliable sources to keep the quality of the information,

v.) Collecting the information in a format,

vi.) Fetching of information by dialogues and by asking quality questions,

vii.) Useful information should be collected by searching, and it should not be in cut&paste models taken from various documents.

To form a competitive infrastructure, corporate memory needs to be very well organized. This is the main fact for using information from the memory. We face as a failure if we use the information from unorganized and mixed data pools. There is a need to pass through from three different training period in order to organize,

• individual training,
• training via communication,
• development of the information repository.

The collected data should be contiunuosly valid and continuously useful after these processes. For continuity, processes should be defined and implemented, transferring of the information between the generations and individuals, will effect the power of corporate memory, and will provide major help for the next steps of competition.

It should be known that the usage of information which is taken from unorganized infrastucture, which has no quality, will bring more harm than its value. Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, Usage of different algorithms in different processes will transform the data to the high quality information.

The continuity of the corporate memory, should be designed by the organization without depending on the individuals. Because of this, when a time comes for a reorganization in the companies, processes should be revised and updated.

This will be the first step for the quality for the information.

Mehmet Bilginsoy