Organizational Memory Formulation by Inference Diagram

Knowledge management(KM) is emerging as a robust management mechanism with which an organization can remain highly intelligent and competitive in a turbulent market. Organization memory(or knowledge) is at the heart of KM success. How to create organizational memory has been debated among researchers. In literature, a wide variety of methods for creating organizational memory have been proposed only to prove that its applicability is limited to decision-making problems which require shallow or non-causal knowledge type. However, organizational memory with a sense of causal knowledge is highly required in solving complicated decision-making problems in which complex dynamics exist between various factors and influence each other with cause and effect relationship among them. In this respect, we propose a new approach to creating a causal-typed organizational memory (CATOM), which has a form of causal knowledge and is represented in a matrix form, by using an inference diagram. An algorithm for CATOM creation is suggested and applied to an illustrative example. Results show that our proposed KM approach can effectively equip an organization with semi-automated CATOM creation and inference process which is deemed useful in a highly competitive business environment.