Supporting the evolution of teams with transactions: A design architecture for organizational memory systems

In this article, we present a general-purpose architecture and design metaphor for supporting the evolution of teams. The architecture is based on the premise that the role of organizational memory involves active support for accessing the relations and content of past, present, and future information-based artifacts of collaborative work. The evolutionary work support role and structure of memory are outlined and contrasted with existing research. A set of design requirements for supporting memory are presented and the concept of a collaborative transaction is introduced. The collaborative transaction concept is the basis for the TeamBox architecture and prototype, which shows that it is possible to generically support the evolutionary needs of collaborative work. The article ends with a discussion of limitations and future research issues.