Organizational Memory.

Organizational Memory is the persistent, shared record of what an organization knows: its decisions, commitments, processes, and relationships, with the reasoning behind them, held as infrastructure the organization owns rather than scattered across individual tools, inboxes, and employees' heads.

Organizations do not primarily suffer from a lack of intelligence; they suffer from fragmented memory. Every employee and every AI system repeatedly reconstructs context that already exists somewhere else. When memory becomes infrastructure, that reconstruction stops: AI systems inherit context instead of starting from zero, new employees inherit institutional knowledge on day one, and decisions stop disappearing after the meeting ends. Memory compounds - and so does the competitive advantage of the organizations that own it.

The term has been used in management research since the early 1990s. The Human Layer series argues it as a layer of enterprise infrastructure: the system of record for organizational intelligence, positioned the way databases were positioned for transactions.