4.1. Storing and Retrieving Information
Organizations store a great deal of "hard" information on a routine basis, sometimes
for operating reasons and sometimes to satisfy the reporting requirements of
other units or organizations. A great deal of organizational knowledge about how to
do things is stored in the form of standard operating procedures, routines, and scripts
(Feldman 1989; Gioia and Poole 1984; Nelson and Winter 1982, pp. 99-1071, and, as
Mintzberg's (1975) work indicates, managers and others routinely acquire and mentally
store "soft" information as well.
What is not well understood, and would be an interesting subject for empirical
research, is the extent to which nonroutine information is deliberately stored to be
106 GEORGE P. HUBER
used as a basis for future decision making. This behavior could involve anticipating
future needs for the information. What variables determine such behavior? Several
possibilities come to mind: the degree to which the future needs are predictable; the
scope of future needs that the member can envision; the commitment to the
well-being of the organization (or to other subunits if storage is not for oneself); and
the accessibility and utility of the channels and mechanisms available for storage.
As a result of specialization, differentiation, and departmentalization, organizations
frequently do not know what they know. The potential for reducing this problem by
including computers as part of the organization's memory is considerable, and
deserves investigation by organizational scientists as well as by computer scientists
and information systems designers.