How to manage knowledge in a virtual organization

Knowledge is often the property of individual decision makers in the organizations and when they leave, their experience is lost by the organization at a great cost. The utilization of an organizational memory is essential in order to avoid knowledge loss. In virtual organizations, where the cooperation between the partners has a restricted life span, this cost may be significant. Existing research is deficient in the utilization of the concepts virtual organization and Knowledge management together. This research has undertaken to study these two concepts together. This paper presents the process of designing an organizational memory for a virtual organization. This process is described on the basis of a case study chosen in the building field. It shows the limits of existing acquisition methods for virtual organisations, some propositions are done to extend one of these methods. A virtual organizational memory for post seismic evaluation is developed using case-based reasoning technique.