Abstract

Organizations use mentoring as a means for employees to share organizational culture and develop leadership qualities. A mentor relationship is said to exist in an organization when a more experienced employee (mentor) assumes the role of a guardian to another employee (mentee). This relationship assists mentees to build their social networks within the organization as mentors share their knowledge gained through years of experience. Benefits from mentoring have been shown to flow not only strictly between individuals involved, but also to the organization in general fostering mentor relationships. Some of the benefits include transfer of corporate culture, the provision of a deep sensing apparatus for top management, and the enhancement of the mentee’s career development. The mentoring process generates knowledge that can be captured and used by the organizational actors. The most important knowledge that the mentee gains from his or her mentor is that which is ingrained in the mentor’s mind, also called tacit knowledge. However, traditional memory information systems do not capture tacit knowledge. Although several initiatives have been proposed to foster mentor relationships in organizations, none of them address the capture of mentors’ tacit knowledge that can be used by others. In this paper, we present an organizational memory information system architecture that can facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge in mentor relationships, develop employees and help imbed organizational culture. The architecture uses scenarios for capturing tacit knowledge and ontology for standardizing data from diverse knowledge sources. Additionally, the scenario-based ontology presents shared understanding of concepts among partners. We demonstrate how the architecture can be used to facilitate the building of leadership qualities (tapping into power lines). This leadership trait, which is tacit and difficult to explicate, has been found to enhance the success of an effective project manager. However, it has been ignored in both practice and research. Implications of this research for both theory and practice are discussed.