When email meets organizational memories: addressing threats to communication in a learning organization

Abstract

The communicative act in a learning organization is subject to a number of threats to its validity (Habermas, 1981), in particular the comprehensibility, truth, trustworthiness and appropriateness of a given message. Organizational memories (OMs) can be used to address these threats. Our focus is on email communication, which suffers from the same threats identified by Habermas. The integration of email with on OM can improve the quality of communication by applying meta-knowledge to appropriately link a given message to the OM. In this paper, we expand upon the direction taken by earlier work of Abecker et al. (1997) with respect to the importance of the object-meta relationship and the use of meta-knowledge to manage (or rather to complete) an OM. We suggest that the focus of the meta-knowledge in an email application, should be on the roles, perspectives, and characteristics of the people in an organization rather than on knowledge description. This, we argue, will effectively ensure that knowledge will not be disassociated from the people and the situation (Sierhuis & Clancey, 1997). We present the HyperMail architecture and sample application to illustrate how formal meta-knowledge is used to re-associate informal email communications to an OM.