Knowing the Impacts of Information Technology: Towards an Organisational Memory System as a Tool for IT-Management Frank Habermann, August-Wilhelm Scheer Institute for Information Systems, University of Saarland PO-Box 151150, D-66041 Saarbruecken, Germany {habermann; scheer}@iwi.uni-sb.de Abstract This paper analyses major problems concerning IT management and examines how an organisational memory system (OMS) may help to overcome them. Emphasis is placed on the organisational impacts of IT, particularly its effects on business processes. This domain was selected because (1) the problems of managing IT and the urge to continuously improve business practices are both very important and closely connected aspects, (2) despite the many excellent approaches to the field, some major questions call for further research, (3) it consists of a bounded knowledge area that can be managed by means of an OMS. Thus, our work discusses theoretical as well as practical questions of knowledge management for the purpose of IT-based process improvements and aims at providing instruments which will help people who are concerned with managing IT. 1. Introduction It is an open secret for a long time past: The management of the resource “knowledge” is an important factor in the success of an enterprise. In particular this is true for enterprises with knowledge-intensive core processes. For instance, in the financial sector, i. e. for banks or insurance companies, the customer processes are very important and for high-technology companies, the product development processes are crucial. Chase Manhattan Bank’s Relationship-Marketing-Database [1] and the Know-how-Database KONUS, which was developed by the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence [2] are examples of knowledge tools in those areas. In addition to the management of knowledge-intensive core processes, the knowledge of organising crucial and expensive resources has to be managed. For example, the most important resources for consulting and software companies are the qualifications of the personnel. In order to define new project teams and to support individual careers, it is decisive to know the academic background, skills and work experiences of the staff. The implementation of Microsoft’s Skills-Planning-and- Development Database [3] is an example of managing knowledge of human resources. However, during the course of the last decade for hardly any other resource so much money was spent as for information and communication technology (IT) [4]. But IT-based innovations do not lead necessarily to business process improvements. A positive effect of IT-investments was missed for a long time particularly for administrative and service processes as well as for indirect-productive processes in industrial companies. Even worse, in some cases paradoxically the increased IT-investments seem to have rather negative effects on business processes [5]. Numerous authors have stressed the point that measuring problems are responsible for this “productivity paradox of IT” to a certain extent [5, 6, 7]. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that a majority of the IT potential is wasted, because appropriate methods and tools for knowledge management within the IT area are missing [5, 6, 8, 9, 10]. The aim of this paper is to describe how an Organisational Memory System (OMS) can be such a tool for managing IT-based innovations particularly, the process effects of IT. The emphasis is on the conceptual description of the OMS design. With “Documentator“, “Mind Mapper“ and “Improvement Process Creator“, the three main functions of the OMS are outlined. The presented work originates from the research project “A computer-based organisational handbook for con- tinuous process improvement“, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (Project Id. Sche 185/20-1). Due to the early stage of the project, this is an initial paper. In future work the here introduced main functions of the OMS have to be developed in greater detail and subsequently prototypically implemented. Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2000 0-7695-0493-0/00 $10.00 (c) 2000 IEEE 1