Managing memory in changing engineering design firms: a closer look at the cultural dimension

Engineering design firms have increasingly moved toward providing clients with "total service solutions", adding finance and maintenance services to their traditional engineering design services. This paper investigates the consequences of such a shift on the mechanisms employed by engineering design firms to support their organizational memory. In doing so, the paper builds on a review of the literature on memory and on the preliminary results of a three-year case study to extend and adapt the current transactive memory model of organizations. In doing so, it provides a way to unpack some of the factors that make up for the cultural component of managing engineering organizations in a fast changing competitive environment.