Corporate Memory

Corporate memory consists of the sum total of the information and knowledge resources within an organization. Such resources are typically distributed and are characterized by multiplicity and diversity: company databases, machine-readable texts, documentation resources and reports, product requirements, design rationale etc.

A corporate memory facility that promotes an organization to leverage its existing information and knowledge assets through effective reuse can be crucial to handling internal and external pressures in an information-driven economy[Huynh, Popkin, &Stecker1994]. A number of benefits can arise out of a well thought out and implemented corporate memory infrastructure(CMI)[Huynh, Popkin, &Stecker1994]:

• Competitive pressures require quick and effective reactions to the ever changing market situations. The gap between the evolving and continuously changing collective information and knowledge resources of an organization and the employee awareness of the existence of such resources and their changes can lead to losses in productivity. CMI seeks to address this problem through ``knowledge-empowerment of workers'', thus enabling them to respond better to market opportunities.
• Timely availability of relevant information from resources accessible to an organization can lead to more informed decisions on the part of individuals (managers, project leaders etc), thereby promoting the effectiveness and viability of decentralized decision making.
• Promotes organizations to become learning systems and avoid repeating the same mistakes[Sharp &Lewis]. Information about past projects - protocols, design specifications, documentation of experiences: both failures and successes, alternatives explored - can all serve as stimulants for learning, leading to ``expertise transfer'' and ``cross-project fertilizations''[Vanwelkenhuysen1996] within and across organizations.

Enablement of effective management of the know-how within a company mandates that a CMI incorporate characteristics like[Huynh, Popkin, &Stecker1994]:

• Semantically rich and flexible access mechanisms
• Automated management of potentially large-scale resource sets
• Efficient management of change and reuse given the dynamic nature of corporate information and knowledge resources
• Adaptability entailing learning from past experiences by recording them along with their context and re-instantiating them in similar future contexts to gain a level of predictability about these new situations.

The above requirements on CMI and the distributed nature of the resources comprising a corporate memory system provide compelling reasons for treating it as a distributed problem solving system. In the subsequent sections, we discuss the potential for distributed case-based reasoning approaches in dealing with access to corporate memory for semantically related but physically dispersed data and knowledge.