Guest columnHow soon they forget: Organizational memory and effective policies // Jon Shamah
Large organizations, either in the private sector or public sector, always have a churning of staff; the problem is that within one or two cycles of churn, anecdotal knowledge, and other unwritten information, just gets lost from the organizational memory; when something bad happens, few people know those solutions which have proven to work in the past and those that have failed miserably
They say that everything is cyclic — weather and economics, for example. Organizational memory is not different. I recently have had peripheral contact with two multi-billion Euro public sector projects having to do with homeland security. Both have been running long enough for key staff to change at least once or twice. It thus comes as no surprise that the core ideas and concepts that have just been “created” by the newest generation are the same as those that were investigated and squarely failed the test earlier in those projects.
It is all about learning lessons from the past.
Large organizations, either in the private sector or public sector, always have a churning of staff. This staff cycle can last for two years as in the case of many IT companies, or maybe up to four or five years in public sector administration. In the NGO sector in the United Kingdom, for example, average job tenure can be as low as twelve months or even less. The result is that when something bad happens, or even if something good happens, few people know those solutions which have proven to work in the past and those that have failed miserably.
The real problem is that within one or two cycles of churn, anecdotal knowledge, and other unwritten information, just gets lost from the organizational memory.
This issue is not new, but organizations are re-discovering the problem and recognizing that something needs to be done. Storage technology and search techniques may be able to solve the technical side of the problem, but that is the easy part.
It is also a cultural issue. Our generation believes it is “enlightened” and knows a better way of doing things. How, then, do you make a convincing argument to search the organizational knowledge repositories for old information?
Firstly, the information and experience needs to be captured and retained. Secondly, it actually needs to be searchable. Thirdly, the action of searching needs to be made an integral part of the business process and socially acceptable.
Capturing and retaining information — and, crucially, experience — is hard, very hard. This is again a human issue. Individuals believe that by retaining experience privately they can protect their own position within the organization. The harder the environment, the more is kept “in the head.” The key here is to make the recording of experiences a major component of any performance management system. In essence, the recording of experiences needs to be safer and
