Cross-organizational Information Reuse: A third vision of collaborative memory in the enterprise

Small organizations are facing a knowledge predicament as they, operate with increasingly sparse pools of employees that must support a broad range of organizational needs. With reduced human resources comes limited time to devote to ancillary work tasks such as documentation. When no local memory system is available, organizations resort to Internet-based repositories. Though these sources contain nearly limitless information they, do so at the cost of rich local context. To bridge the gap between internal and Internet-based memory systems this research explores a third vision;, one which establishes virtual partnerships between small organizations. Using ethnographic methods this field study examines the: socio-technical ramifications of cross-organizational information reuse. relevance of information developed by partner organizations. and system tools that support efficient cross-organizational knowledge flow.