Sustaining Grass-roots Organizational Memories: Methods and Effects of Applying Managed Forgetting in Administrative Corporate Scenarios

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Introducing ‘forgetting’ into organizational knowledge management methods and practices promises to help overcoming information overload and to ease focusing on and refinding the really important things. Based on the results of the first phase, in this project, we will further investigate the concept of managed forgetting and its adequate framing, when applied in a corporate context. ‘Managed’ forgetting - an evidence-based routine of intentional forgetting that does not require conscious will - aims to translate cognitive mechanisms especially the focusing power of forgetting into the digital world, while at the same time complementing human remembering and forgetting. This is done by automatically collecting a variety of evidences for predicting the importance of information items and by combining the inferred information value - the ‘memory buoyancy’ - with a flexible set of forgetting actions. The further development of the concept Managed Forgetting requires comprehensive interdisciplinary research of its foundations and effects, of intelligent methods for its implementation as well as of its embedding into knowledge management and corporate processes. For achieving the objectives experts from three different domains – cognitive science, information analysis and retrieval and knowledge management – will closely work together in this project. Cognitive science experiments will deepen the understanding of relevant cognitive processes and investigate the effects of employing cognitive principles in organizational memories. Considering different temporal frames and the relationship between resources, we will develop multifaceted methods for information value assessment, which help in understanding the current item’s importance. The learned memory buoyancy will be used to develop advanced ‘forgetful’ information access methods for a grass-roots organizational memory, which meet the needs of administrative knowledge work processes. Finally, we will investigate the effects on the user, which incorporates empirical testing, validation in a real company context, and investigating the interactions between human and digital forgetting. Evaluation and experiments will play a crucial role in the project. Therefore, the Semantic Desktop is providing an ideal crystallization point for our interdisciplinary research: (a) It supports the typical activities of a knowledge worker, e.g. in administration; (b) it already maps the conceptual organization of the human cognitive system into a grass-roots organizational memory system via an personal ontology and (c) it provides a testbed for technical, cognitive and interdisciplinary research and experimentation. Based on the results for two research areas, namely ‘Arbeitsfeld 1’ and ‘Arbeitsfeld 2’ from the first phase of the project, we will further refine those results in the second phase, while focusing on ‘Arbeitsfeld 4’, i.e., exploring forgetful methods for the application area “Administration”.