Definition
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.
Why it matters
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.
Where it comes from
The term is defined and developed across the Human Layer series, which proposes Organizational Memory as a new enterprise infrastructure layer - the system of record for organizational intelligence, positioned the way databases were positioned for transactions.
Read the source papers: The Human Layer · The Sovereign Memory Layer