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workers. The average length of time a highly skilled and experienced employee spends
at a particular company has shortened considerably. Increased turnover may be due
to downsizing, retirement, and high mobility in a given industry, or it may even be
intentional (e.g., rotations in the military or limited-term mandates). Tacit knowledge
has often been referred to as “ the knowledge that leaves at the end of the day ” and
companies are said to “ lease ” knowledge but not own it. Tacit knowledge in this sense
resides in the knowledge workers themselves and has not been documented to any
great extent. Uncaptured knowledge is therefore at risk of being lost to the organiza-
tion. In fact, organizational forgetting may be denoted as a form of “ corporate amnesia ”
( Kransdorff 1998 ). There is a high cost to the fi rm of losing know-how that resides
within the minds of individual employees who depart. In an era of knowledge workers,
individuals are increasingly responsible for value creation.
Although many organizations have succession plans in place, the process usually
involves transferring know-how from the departing employee to their successor, but
the whole process has to be repeated again for the next departure. Organizations need
to “ capture ” this know-how and transfer it to a stable, easily accessible, cumulative
knowledge base — an organizational memory — to retain and make accessible valuable
knowledge gained through the experiences of all knowledge in a continuous and
uninterrupted manner. The possibility of a critical mass of employees all retiring at
the same time has been anticipated as baby boomers reach retirement age. A proactive
approach is needed for organizations to effectively manage their organizational
memory in order to prevent the loss of essential knowledge, particularly knowledge
that resides predominantly in the heads of their knowledge workers and less in docu-
ments, procedures, and other tangible forms. More often than not, it is this diffi cult-
to-articulate know-how that is of greatest value in organizational competitiveness and
viability.
The National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), for example, has pub-
licly admitted that the knowledge of how to put a man on the moon has been lost.
The lessons that were learned and the innovations that were sparked cannot be found
in the collective organizational memory of NASA. This means that NASA ’ s organiza-
tional memory cannot be used as a resource to plan a more effective mission to send
another manned fl ight to the moon or to Mars. A well-designed and well-managed
organizational memory not only combats corporate amnesia, but it ensures knowledge
continuity — the effective transfer of know-how among peers and to future generations
of knowledge workers. A better understanding of the nature of organizational memory,
what it should include (content), how it can best be retained (technological contain-
ers), and how the accumulated lessons learned and best practices can be used by