Knowledge acquisition for an organisational memory system

Decision support systems with a knowledge base containing specific past decision situations regarding an organisation may be referred to as organisational memory systems. A record of these past decisions is assumed to be beneficial to decision makers and their organisation. Building such systems involves collecting past decision situations from a decision maker. This is analogous to knowledge acquisition where an expert's knowledge is elicited and modelled. Knowledge acquisition describes the task of eliciting past decision situations (cases) and their characteristics from an expert decision maker. The resulting computer system provides case based organisational memory to support decision making. The paper proposes a knowledge acquisition method for the development of case based organisational memory. The method combines a number of techniques and is illustrated by a real world application.