Where OM Resides

OM has two repositories: the institution’s archives and individuals’ memories, the former’s composition being prior data and information, specifically internally generated documentation to do with the organization’s activities. This includes intellectual property (patents; copyrights; trademarks; brands; registered design; trade secrets and processes, whose ownership is granted to the company by law; licensing; and partnering agreements), details of events, products and individuals (including relationships with people in outside organizations and professional bodies), relevant published reference material, and, importantly, institution- created knowledge. Its application is only possible if it can be accessed, necessitating effective retrieval systems in the case of archives and good memory recall in the case of employees, while its importance to an organization is entirely dependent on how well individuals can apply it. The same is applicable to the other repository, individuals’ memories.

Conventional business instruction is largely a one-size-fits-all education that is designed to provide generalized skills within specific fields such as finance, marketing, strategy, and leadership. However useful and necessary is the provision of generic data and information, it is OM that, in a specific organizational context, greases the corporate wheels (Krandorff, 2006). Widely unmined, and the management of which is untaught, it is often called records or document management and is more often interpreted as just being the collection of one’s accumulated records and artifacts, which might include a sycophantic corporate history after 25, 50, or 100 years. This is true, but it is just the explicit part of OM—the “what” of know-how—the type of information that is codified in the abundant manuals, text books and training courses available. What is missing is the tacit or cognitive component, the type of knowledge that is not what most organizations end up capturing in their sophisticated and expensive electronic databanks. Sometimes known as coping skills or the nontechnical “how” of getting things done, it is a category first identified by Michael Polyani in 1958; what Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral thinking, calls “operacy,” or the skill of action; and what Peter Drucker identified in the use of the word “techne” (Greek for “skill”; Polanyi, 1967; de Bono, 1981; Drucker, 1993). Much of it is implicit and ambiguous, acquired largely by experience that is functional and context/institution-specific. It typically exists only in the minds of individuals and is difficult to capture. It is through tacit knowledge that most erudition is gained.