"Yeah, the rush ain't here yet - Take a break": Creation and use of an artifact as organizational memory

Abstract

In order to understand organizational memory, it is important to understand how things become adopted as memory resources in organizations. In this paper, we describe the genesis and use of an artifact that became a memory resource for a wide range of activities. We discuss how the creation and use of the rush cheat sheet (RCS) and its associated representations at Dallas Ft. Worth TRACON brought together information and expert knowledge across organizational boundaries. Multi-organizational information became synthesized in a composite that could be used as a resource by the contributing organizations, acting as a boundary object. However, it is multiple representations of the same data that enable it to be so used. Using distributed cognition theory, we examined the conditions under which data transforms from an internal resource to a boundary object; speculating about domain generalization.