Abstract

Collaborative activities such as coordination, decision-making and negotiation critically depend on historical information of an organization. This information is usually part of isolated legacy information systems, therefore, it can be inconsistent, redundant and difficult to retrieve and link. Previous research in CSCW has proposed the use of Organizational Memory Systems (OMS) to accumulate, organize, preserve, link and share diverse information coming from various sources, and thus support such collaborative activities. However, there is a need to provide a low-cost feeding process, to embed privacy mechanisms and to support information retrieval capabilities for all users of the OMS, in order to make these solutions useful to a broad range of organizations. As a way to deal with this need, this paper presents a transformational model able to: (a) facilitate the feeding of an OMS based on information stored in legacy information systems, (b) ease the information retrieval process, and (c) embed automatic mechanisms to evolve the information stored in the OMS, through a document privacy lifecycle. This is a low-cost solution that can be implemented using OpenSource technologies. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.