Collective learning Conflict between Computerised Collective Memory and the Prescriptive Organisation Organizational Memory as Process not Object Collective decision making and knowledge management in oncology Cooperative work conditions in a satellite control room. READ MY LIPS....BUT ALSO THE REST Collective memory from the everyday work. Visualised co-ordination support in distributed decision making Knowledge Management for Collective Learning and Organisational Memory Knowledge graphs Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory General discussion

Collective memory from the everyday work. Carla Simone: Dipartimento di Informatica - Universita' di Torino Corso Svizzera 185 - 10149 Torino (Italy) e-mail: simone@di.unito.it Summary Collective learning and collective memory are quite complex topics not only because they involve several interdisciplinary aspects that make it difficult even to define them in an effective way but also because it is not clear which are the purposes they serve. In other words, why an organization and its members should pay a price for them? We are not claiming that this question has no answer, rather that the answers are usually very generic and cover a broad set of motivations: among the others, improving the capability of handling exceptions (up to emergency and time-critical situations), reducing the cost of the turn-over, enhancing the consciousness of the organizational members about their dynamic context to improve creativity or positive attitudes to cooperation. The point is that it is hard to imagine a common way to deal with all these requirements in a single approach and strategy for 'realizing' collective learning and collective memory. And, of course, to identify any computational support to these processes. As a first evidence, each organization motivation for constructing a collective memory carries specific learning techniques and their combination, among the several that have been considered: by teaching, by doing, by examples, etc. As a second evidence, each motivations identifies different pieces of information that is worthwhile to learn and/or to record, and different ways to relate them for future retrival. Bearing in mind this premise, our focus is on collective learning and collective memory motivated by the encreasing of people's capability to deal with exceptions and critical situations in contexts showing dynamic demands of by the organization and its environment. Moreover, our focus is on articulation work more that on the work content specific to each field of work. From the articulation work perspective, the successful handling of exceptions and critical situations is the result of many concomitant factors, among which we would like to underline the following: the possibility to forecast or to recognize the events leading to the situation with a high degree of advance. This not only might reduce the range of negative effects generated from the emergency but also increase the time available to define suitable strategies for its management. the possibility of having a 'complete' picture of the 'current' situation. The two words in quotes highlight where the difficulties arise. In fact, in the general case, the work setting in which the critical situation occurs shows a high degree of distributedness so that the completeness of the picture is hard to reach since it is impossible to reconstruct its global state. On the other hand, the available pieces of information about the parts of the work settings that have to be involved when the exception asises are rarely updated (critical situations are irregular) and therefore weakly reliable. the possibility of recovering the past experience in the management of 'similar' situations. This is often described as the possibility of accessing an 'organizational memory' where to look for information that should be first of all correctly interpreted and then applied or adapted to the current situation. While not exhaustive the above points show that (part of) the management of emergencies is deeply rooted in the everyday work, either as memory of experiences or as a capability of interpreting of what is going on or is expected in the near future. Consequently, any (technological) support to the emergency management should be deeply coupled with the (technological) support to the everyday work on the one hand, and on the other hand this latter has to be conceived, from the very beginning, as a provider of information potentially exploitable when the critical situation arises. Presentation and discussion In her presentation, Carla suggested the following uses of collective memory: for innovation for increasing cooperation for managing turn-over for handling of exceptions, for dealing with critical situations If we imagine that we have to extract knowledge to a collective memory for future use, which knowledge has to be extracted? The knowledge may concern the field of work, and thus be domain specific, and it may concern articulation work, which makes it situation specific. The articulation work is concerned with creating conditions for coordination. Carla is working with a concept called "coordination mechanisms". By this is meant a set of protocols and artifacts for coordinating behaviours. These structure the information and reflect the behaviour. In a computerized form, the coordination mechanisms should be malleable and linkable. Two types of coordination mechanisms were suggested: classifications - which are related to the field of work "workflows" - which are related to articulation work.