OMCCAAF: articulating organizational memory and business intelligence.

Anica-Popa, Liana-Elena

Abstract: In this paper we concentrated ideas from a study concerning the organizational cognitive acquis' capitalization in the Accounting and Financial (AF) area. We attempted to find out new elements for our OMCCAAF methodological framework aiming to guiding specialists in building an Organizational Memory (OM). In this respect, we tried to answer, mainly, in a teleological approach, to the questions: "Why embedding Business Intelligence (BI) and OM?" and "How articulating OM and BI?" in an OM design process.

Key words: OMCCAAF, organizational memory, intelligent organization, business intelligence, organizational benefits

1. INTRODUCTION

Over the last decades of the present "Information Age", companies have expended considerable resources to implement Business Intelligence (BI) technologies, in order to provide decision-making processes with reliable knowledge and to improve activities' effectiveness. The way that knowledge workers access, exchange and promote information evolved significantly towards innovative approaches aiming to acquire competitive advantages for their organizations.

In the literature, there are many studies embedding OM and BI. Sabherwal & Becerra-Fernandez (2010) associates OM storage capabilities with BI, in conjunction with other three types of abilities: information integration, business analytics, and presentation. Complying the classic definitions' triad data--information--knowledge, the OM was viewed serving to memorize structured and unstructured information--raw materials for BI instruments; correlate data from different sources was define like information integration activities; business analytics create and provide decision-makers with new perspectives based on extant information; utilizing appropriate tools to make BI results more valuable and easier to understand and apply was the perception of the presentation category of capabilities.

The "organizational intelligence" concept was placed in the area of knowing better and anticipate the customers behaviors also the competitors' position and strategies, in order to underpin organizational decisions process and provide a competitive advantage (Bucur & Pribac, 2010). In this general picture, where organizations manifest interest into experiment different theoretical and practical knowledge capitalization processes, the OM appears as an on time and suitable "presence", providing ways to leverage the cognitive acquis in quotidian activity of an economic entity.

In this context, the work hypothesis was that designing and implementing OM should take into consideration the existence of a BI organizational system or the possibility to implement one in the future. This assumption was inspired by the observation of some common capabilities of BI and OM and by the glimpse of some possibilities to correlate and connect OM and BI mechanism, at conceptual and implementation levels.

Our scientific investigation, conducting within a running research project, was oriented towards identifying conceptual elements (possible situations, activities and goals to pursue by the OM developers) articulating BI to OM and completing thereby a new methodological framework aiming the capitalization of the cognitive acquis in the accounting and financial (AF) area through Organizational Memory--OMCCAAF. The methodological approach included direct observation of AF activities, introspection and analysis of the BI and OM literature and practice.

Some brief considerations about costs and benefits related to knowledge production and capitalization at organizational level and some concluding insights are elaborated at the end.

2. EMBEDDING OM AND BI

Many studies concerning the knowledge and intellectual capital were developed during last decades. Other numerous research approaches treated with capitalization problems of explicit and tacit knowledge through OM. Bencsik et al. (2009) emphasized the distinction between organizational knowledge and OM. If in the organizational knowledge was included all "abilities, cognition, knowledge or information on the level of individual, group and organization to which an organization has indirect or direct access", for the OM they stipulated its independency from any members and a content defined by "routines, values and data which remain comparatively permanent when members are exchanged". Similar to the biological meaning of memory, OM systems should propose mechanism for memorization and remembrance, acquiring, coding, storing, recalling, fixing, and spreading knowledge within working / learning processes.

The BI was generally defined like processes of collecting and analyzing internal and external business information (Okkonen et al., 2002) but also like an architecture of applications, platforms, tools, and technologies that support the process of exploring business data, data relationships, and trends and provide the business community easy access to business data (Raisinghani, 2004; Moss & Atre, 2003).

Storing and leveraging organizational knowledge could be considered common capabilities for OM and BI. The OM structures could provide data, information, and knowledge like raw material for BI analysis and different instruments for memorizing primary data, information or knowledge. Results of BI processes--organizational knowledge--could constitute objects of capitalization activities, supported by OM features. Hence, during the preparatory stage of building an OM, focusing on a possible OM-BI articulation, we suggest a responsible preliminary analysis, in order to:

* avoid duplication of some extant data storage and treatment structures, in case of a BI system already implemented;

* facilitate further connections and correlations between OM elements and BI tools, by designing, for example, saving instruments for capturing BI results; this situation could correspond to a future development of an organizational BI application.

In the context of tremendous development of the Web, the content, the usage and the web structure could add value to organizational knowledge by using competitive intelligence (CI) techniques (Cucui et al., 2010) in order to exploit outward existing data about competitors and economic environment. Searching for extant CI instruments, integrated or not in BI systems, and for assimilation possibilities into OM knowledge structures of what it could provide may help to design better OM and its future connections with CI mechanisms.

Including all these synthesized elements in OMCCAAF and many others creates the premises for obtaining effective instances of OM.

3. ASSESSING RELATED COSTS AND BENEFITS

Examining the financial implication for organizations into developing systems for knowledge capitalization, it seems that producing knowledge is expensive but reproducing it is cheap. If fixed costs are high, the marginal costs of the informational good items are low. Interesting for this kind of products is assessing it according to consumer value and not to the production cost. On information market, we could pay differently for versions of the same good depending on the delay between versions occurrence and our imperativeness in using it (Shapiro & Varian, 2003). Once the knowledge was stored through OM mechanism, it can be reused within BI analysis processes with a minimal organizational effort.

Concerning the benefits of BI deployment in AF area, there are four main categories (Ritacco et al., 2007): quantifiable benefit (e.g., working time saved in producing reports); indirectly quantifiable benefit (e.g., improved customer service means new business from the same customer); unpredictable benefit (discoveries made by creative users); intangible benefit (e.g., improved job satisfaction of empowered users, improved knowledge sharing). They proposed a solution for evaluate these types of BI benefits including: (1) measurement of the expected quantifiable benefits; (2) qualitative description of anticipated intangible benefits; (3) estimation of the total cost of ownership (TCO), including hardware, software, personnel, consulting services, and future ongoing costs. If TCO < quantifiable and indirectly quantifiable benefits, then the system is worth the outflow. In other cases, then the unpredictable and intangible benefits should be evaluated to outline decisions making processes.

Organizational memory is fragmented in different systems, database technologies, distributed in various locations. There are cases of an underused intelligence system, and/or a trade-off too frequent, which are costly; infrequently use generates old data and a reduced response speed--premises for loss or supplementary costs for the organization. Analysis of costs and benefits of an OM design and features improvement by BI articulations could offer an image about the organizations' effort and advantages in capitalization processes. The literature and practice suggest that the knowledge capitalization balance costs--benefits would be favorable to benefits.

4. CONCLUSIONS

The success of every organization will depend on its ability to generate, adopt and diffuse knowledge. The skills and tools required to manage a knowledge organization are found in the emerging domains of knowledge capitalization. By examining (a) the link between OM and BI; (b) how the BI features could be utilized in knowledge capitalization processes and (c) proposing a conceptual articulation between OM and BI structures and results, we attempted to cover a gap into our OMCCAAF design process. We hope that any instance of OMCCAAF--an OM built based on this framework--could be an efficient tool for in-depth leveraging of knowledge produced by BI structures using the OM facilities, or by OM features exploiting possible BI results.

BI seems to provide means to leveraging better the cognitive acquis in general and the AF one specially, contributing to the accomplishment of people professional tasks and to enhance learning processes within organization. They can help reduce costs, increase revenues, and improve organizational performance. BI modules for integrating data located in different OM sources and obtaining reports required by the organization management could be an example of articulation OM--BI. Data warehouses and data mining technologies are unaware of and for finding different correlations; there are necessary some modules to support decision making processes, modern tools for querying and reporting; maybe the knowledge steward also should have the ability to manage OM and BI features together (e.g., to integrate data from different sources, prepare reports, aggregate data).

Introducing into OM designed structure conceptual elements that can provide direct and rapid access to knowledge for the organization employees could offer the ground for a future research direction: developing effective organizational Memory Information Systems (OMIS).

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study was conducted within the scientifically research project number Id_1866/2008, Contract no. 766/2009, currently running, financed by The National University Research Council (CNCS), Romania, into the framework of National Plan of Research, Development and Innovation--PN II, Ideas Program, 2008 Competition. The title is "Research regarding the modeling of the organizational memory: OMCCAAF, a new methodological framework for the capitalization of the cognitive acquis in the accounting and financial area".

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