Collaborative activities such as coordination, decision making and negotiation
critically depend on historical information of an organization. This
information is usually part of isolated legacy information systems, therefore
it can be inconsistent, redundant and difficult to retrieve and link. Previous
research in CSCW has proposed the use of Organizational Memory Systems (OMS) to
accumulate, organize, preserve, link and share diverse information coming from
various sources, and thus support such collaborative activities. However, there
is a need to provide a low cost feeding process, to embed privacy mechanisms
and to support information retrieval capabilities for all users of the OMS, in
order to make these solutions useful to a broad range of organizations. As a
way to deal with this need, this paper presents a transformational model able
to: (a) facilitate the feeding of an OMS based on information stored in legacy
information systems, (b) ease the information retrieval process, and (c) embed
automatic mechanisms to evolve the information stored in the OMS, through a
document privacy lifecycle. This is a low-cost solution that can be implemented
using OpenSource technologies.