When email meets organizational memories: addressing threats to communication in a learning organization

The communicative act in a learning organization is subject to a number of threats to its validity (Habermas, 1981), in particular the comprehensibili ty, truth, trustworthiness and appropriateness of a given message. Organiza tional memories (OMs) can be used to address these threats. Our focus is on email communication, which suffers from the same threats identified by Hab ermas. The integration of email with on OM can improve the quality of commu nication by applying meta-knowledge to appropriately link a given message t o the OM. In this paper, we expand upon the direction taken by earlier work of Abecker et al. (1997) with respect to the importance of the object-meta relationship and the use of meta-knowledge to manage (or rather to complet e) an OM. We suggest that the focus of the meta-knowledge in an email appli cation, should be on the roles, perspectives, and characteristics of the pe ople in an organization rather than on knowledge description. This, we argu e, will effectively ensure that knowledge will not be disassociated from th e people and the situation (Sierhuis & Clancey, 1997). We present the Hyper Mail architecture and sample application to illustrate how formal meta-know ledge is used to re-associate informal email communications to an OM. (C) 1 999 Academic Press.