John Zavacki wrote [Attribution to John corrected by your host...]
> "Any company with half an organizational brain that uses a corrective and
> preventive action system would use this system as a corporate memory. By
> asking for corrective and preventive actions in a formal, electronic
> system and then indexing that system, it becomes a lot easier to avoid the
> reinvention of Scott's Square Wheel."
While collecting and capturing data about the causes and corrective /
preventative actions of undesirable events certainly makes the data
available to others in the present and future, I wonder if it word truly
become part of the corporations "active" memory. My experience in an
organziation, that electronically documents all loss incidents (along with
their causes and recommended actions) is that the data is seldom used.
People very seldom access the information.
One advantage of capturing the data one place, is that is then ameanable
to anlysis for trends, commonalities re. causal factors and the perhaps
the identification of some underlying system causes. The communication of
these learnings and any resulting changes in processes or procedures
contributes to organziational learning and to the "active" corporate
memory.
I think communication is the key, because corporate memory it seems to me,
lies in the "active" memory of the individuals of which the corporation is
comprised.
Unfortunately, in my limited experience, the scenario described of
analysing and learning from the collected data is not a frequent
occurance. There are several reason, I would think, some of them being:
- this type of analyses is not a preferred activity of most people
- people are busy doing other things, to quote Covey, this is a
quadrant II activity (important but not urgent)
- the data is often not complete thus immediately useful, to capture
all the data for an event takes a fair bit of effort.
At any rate, the collection of information in electronic form, is
certainly a first step it seems to me that it will require certain
corporate culture if it is to function as a corporate memory.
--"Jerry Handford" <ghandfor@[198.161.96.1]>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>