Concept, Information System, and Process: Exploring the
Relationships Between Records and Organizational
Memory Towards an Integration
Qianqian Yang
School of Information Management, Sun Yat-sen University, Higher Education Mega Center, Guangzhou, P. R. China
Keywords: Organizational Memory, Knowledge Management, Records Management, Information System.
Abstract: The utilization of cognitive technologies in records management and the richness of information resources
stored in current organizational memory information system (OMIS) highlight the vague positioning of OMIS
and electronic records management system (ERMS). This article provides an analysis on the relationships
between records and organizational memory from three dimensions including the concept, information system
and management process by adopting comparative methodology and literature research. On comparing the
nature between the terms, it clarifies that records should function as raw material to be transferred into
knowledge of organizational memory in practice. Accordingly, the gap between OMIS and ERMS that fails
to actualize the connection between records and organizational memory is explained. In order to facilitate
sufficient knowledge management, a possible conceptual solution is proposed to procedurally integrate
management of records and organizational memory with OMIS and ERMS. Further noteworthy research are
also provided according to the analysis.
1 INTRODUCTION
The role of information technology and information
system in supporting knowledge management and
organizational memory have been discussed, (Robey
et al., 2000; Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Perez and
Ramos, 2013; de Azeredo Barros et al., 2015) while
the extent that information technology can support the
management of organizational memory depends
much on the objects that information systems are
developed to process with. Despite the plenty of
studies in respective field of organizational memory,
knowledge management, information system and
records management, the exact forms of information
stored as organizational memory remains vague and
various in different perspectives. An enhancement of
the practicability of organizational memory on the
basis of recognizing its tangible retention forms is
emphasized. (Robey et al., 2000; Dow et al., 2013; de
Azeredo Barros et al., 2015) Studies about
organizational memory information system (OMIS,
also referred as knowledge management system,
KMS) should pay more attention to the exact type,
provenance, content, context and processing of
information to be retained as knowledge or
organizational memory, so as to facilitate its practical
development.
Records as artifacts is considered to be a major
and important category among the various retention
forms of organizational memory (Walsh and Ungson,
1991; Stein, 1995; Moorman and Miner, 1997) for the
reason that it is the final consolidated object that
document activity processes of an organization. In
digital environment, electronic records are required to
be simultaneously captured into the electronic records
management system (ERMS) at the time being
created with adequate metadata and are arranged with
an intention for long-term preservation. Solutions
such as data and text mining (Ward et al., 2005; etc.),
ontologies building and utilization (Bountouri and
Gergatsoulis, 2011; etc.), visualization (Xu et al.,
2011; etc.) etc. are brought into recent research
related to archival electronic records management,
which indicates that archival electronic records can be
exploited as knowledge through information
technologies utilized in general knowledge
management and knowledge discovery. Whereas
OMIS may also include identical information as
106
Yang, Q..
Concept, Information System, and Process: Exploring the Relationships Between Records and Organizational Memory Towards an Integration.
In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2015) - Volume 3: KMIS, pages 106-110
ISBN: 978-989-758-158-8
Copyright
c
 2015 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

documented in records so as to be analyzed and mined
to be explicit knowledge. Due to the similarity in the
process of knowledge management, the role and
function of ERMS in practical work is overlapped
with OMIS to some extent.
Accordingly, this paper attempts to analyze the
following interrelated issues:
Q1: What is the theoretical and practical
relationship between organizational memory and
records?
Q2: What is the relationship between OMIS and
ERMS in both current and ideal sense?
Q3: To what extent can the management of
archival records integrate to the construction of
organizational memory?
2 NATURE OF
ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
AND RECORDS
2.1 Essence of the Terms
Records is byproduct generated from the past activity
and it also functions as information resources from
which people acquire evidence or thoughts and ideas
about the past to support present decisions. (Yates,
1990) In this sense, records is similar to the essential
nature of organizational memory as object (Stein,
1995; Abecker and Decker, 1999; Ackerman and
Halverson, 2004). While the essence of
organizational memory is more emphasized as being
knowledge, records is acting more of being evidence.
As The theory of “records continuum” presents four
sequential levels in the dimension of evidential axis
as representational trace, evidence,
organizational/individual memory and collective
memory. (Upward, 1996; McKemmish, 2001) It is
commonly considered that the professional
management of records constructs integrated memory
for different levels from trace to society.
2.2 Difference as being Knowledge
Organizational memory is essentially managed as
explicit knowledge. (de Azeredo Barros et al., 2015)
It is identified for the purpose to provide applicable
knowledge for organizational decisions, thus the
implication of constructing and processing
organizational memory is to acquire applicable
knowledge. While records is rather primitive stable
information in which knowledge is tacit but easy to
be discovered given clarified demand and semantic
structure. Records managers identify records in order
to preserve valuable evidence and complete traces of
activities; the consideration of access to records is
relatively separated from the original goal to collect it
since it is almost impossible to anticipate potential
use demands.
The reason why records is considered to be an
important retention form of organizational memory
ascribes to the fact that records collections are mostly
selected through constructive archival appraisal and
are systematically arranged for unarticulated potential
use, which enables knowledge to be explicit through
certain approaches such as text mining, reasoning or
by utilizing ontologies, so as to function as easily
accessible organizational memory.
It can thus be concluded that, organizational
memory is managed as knowledge with the primitive
purpose to benefit from inherent explicit knowledge.
While the essence of records as trace separates the
purpose of collecting it and using it, rendering the
knowledge in records to be tacit and await to be
discovered for various use. In this case, clarified use
demand is important.
3 GAP BETWEEN
ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
INFORMATION SYSTEM AND
ELECTRONIC RECORDS
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Generally, the core function of OMIS is knowledge
management, involving the processes of capturing,
retaining, accessing and using of knowledge. In
contrast, ERMS is constructed for the purpose of
capturing, retaining and accessing electronic records,
the underlying core of which is records management.
3.1 Difference in Information
Resources
Records is practically a major resources applied in
OMIS, especially those produced by individuals.
However, current OMIS and ERMS acquires and
manages different types of records. Specifically,
records acquired by OMIS are mainly those produced
by individuals that contain individual thoughts and
experiences. While records retained in ERMS is
organizational records and often includes documents
Concept, Information System, and Process: Exploring the Relationships Between Records and Organizational Memory Towards an
Integration
107

with formal patterns as evidence to fulfill the
requirements of either jurisdiction or informational
reference or cultural continuity.
Although it is conceptually held that records is a
major source of knowledge as organizational memory,
practical construction of information systems reveals
that the actual type of records acquired by the two
systems are different. It practically indicates that the
concepts of records and organizational memory are
overlapped rather than one included by the other as
theoretically stated. This explains why the
disciplinary communication of research in the field of
records management and organizational memory
seems to be one-sided that records management adopt
a lot the perspectives of memory and knowledge
management, while the role of records could seldom
be seen within research of organizational memory.
3.2 Characteristics of Systems
Most of the current OMIS function as a platform or
tools to provide access to organizational information
or to bear communication within the organization as
a process to facilitate knowledge reuse. The
decontextualization and recontextualization
(Ackerman and Halverson, 2004) of information is
core to the extraction and reuse of knowledge, which
is also one of the most remarkable challenges for the
development of OMIS. ERMS is essentially a
repository of electronic records identified with
archival value; and it functions as a recordkeeping
system and a platform that provides access to reliable
primitive documental information resources. Based
on the principles of records management, it stresses
much on the maintenance of stable linkage between
records and its contextual information, e.g. metadata
maintenance and continuous classification (Bak,
2012) etc.
Consequently, it can be seen from the above that
OMIS and ERMS are designed and implemented for
different purposes. According to theoretical statement,
primitive records should be a source of organizational
memory. Ideally, ERMS should be focused in
recordkeeping and function as fundamental
repository of archival information resources, while
OMIS uses records from ERMS as material resources
to extract knowledge. However, according to
development and implementation research of OMIS
and ERMS (Parboteeah et al., 2011; Bayram and
Demirtel, 2014; de Azeredo Barros et al., 2015; etc.),
there is still gap in the connection of the system
utilization.
4 SEAMLESS INTEGRATION OF
THE PROCESSES
Basing on the position that records should practically
transfer into knowledge to be the source of
organizational memory, it is necessary to analyze the
procedural integration of records and organizational
memory management.
4.1 The Construction Process of
Organizational Memory and Role
of Records
On the whole, the construction of organizational
memory consists of knowledge demand identification
and knowledge extraction. The former is based on the
analysis of organizational communication and the
semantic structure for identifying and retaining
knowledge should be established by the system
initially (de Azeredo Barros et al., 2015). Whereas the
latter should utilize various information resources
distributed in different organizational information
systems including ERMS, and facilitate reuse of
knowledge through categorization of meta-memory.
(Nevo and Wand, 2005)
Accordingly, the use demand of records is
essentially a source to the analysis of knowledge
demand, and records stored in ERMS as primitive
information resources should be able to transfer into
knowledge. It is thus indicated that current solutions
in analyzing records demand and exploiting records
content should stress more on realizing its knowledge
value so that it can subsequently be used as
organizational memory.
4.2 A Procedural Integration
There are currently a few of solutions essentially
facilitate the procedural integration of organizational
memory and records. Such solutions and strategies
can be generally categorized into two types.
The first type refers to the cognitive technologies
utilized in the reuse of electronic records. For instance,
data mining is used in the exploitation and reuse of
Web Archives. (Larson et al., 2014; Nguyen and
Weber, 2015) Case-based reasoning is used in
annotation in digital archives. (Doumat, 2014)
Ontology research is also conducted in the
construction and reuse of archive and records.
(Askhoj et al., 2015)
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The other type refers to the design, development
and implementation of integrated content-based
information management systems for the purpose of
facilitating organizational information resources
integration and reuse, among which the enterprise
content management (ECM) earns much attention. It
is argued that ERMS should be integrated with ECM
(Sprehe, 2005) so as to better perform the primitive
value of records. Within the development of ECM,
records came to be a significant part of the
information resources stored in ECM. (Alalwan and
Weistroffer, 2012; Katuu, 2012)
Current solutions focus on a significant procedure
of records transferring into knowledge, but it fails to
solve the management problem in procedural
integration. That is, how do the demand of knowledge
impact and direct the transfer of records into
knowledge; and how can the actual information
systems as ERMS, OMIS, KMS and ECM be
allocated to proper function and to integrate and
interact with each other smoothly within an
organization. In the author’s opinion, such issues are
worth of being further studies and solved so as to
enhance the utilization efficiency of information
technologies and systems.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The integration of records and organizational
memory is not only a technological issue, but also
depends much on the management mode of
organizational information resources.
(1) According to theoretical analysis, records
should function as a significant source of
organizational memory, which embodies as
knowledge in actual practice. To align with the
principle articulated in theory, records should be
extracted and transfer into knowledge of
organizational memory. Current solutions have been
actualizing such transfer through cognitive
technologies.
(2) However, it should also consider the issues in
procedural mechanism of records transferring into
pragmatic intellectual organizational memory. One of
a noteworthy issue lies in the managerial and
functional positioning of OMIS, and the integration
of OMIS (KMS) with ERMS. A possible solution
derived from the analysis in this paper is to reallocate
between OMIS and ERMS, in which ERMS functions
as repository and archival management platform for
reliable and primitive electronic records, while OMIS
automatically extracts information resources accord
with knowledge demand from ERMS and process the
information to produce knowledge.
(3) Another important issue is the loop between
knowledge demand, records transfer and
organizational communication, which also raises
requirements for the integration of the information
systems so as to ensure and facilitate the dynamic
process. Basically, current OMIS can support the
actualization of the loop, but the interaction with
ERMS to acquire “primitive knowledge material”
should be reinforced.
Much efforts need to be done in further studies,
including further clarifying the positioning of the
information systems; the transferring relationships
between records and organizational memory and its
realization in the environment of information systems;
and the connection between knowledge demand
identification and the corresponding records
extraction. Such research would be beneficial to the
development of organizational knowledge
management and records management, as well as
promoting interdisciplinary studies.
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