<story><title>Institutional memory and reverse smuggling</title><url>http://wrttn.in/04af1a</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>16s</author><text>I&apos;ve seen memory drains during down-turns in the economy. The company will offer the oldest, most-experienced, highest paid employees a buy-out or they&apos;ll offer them five years extra pension/retirement if they leave now. Mgt figures that consultants can be hired if they ever need X, Y or Z done again at a fraction of the cost of the employees.&lt;p&gt;Many senior employees accept the offers, and then later mgt realizes that 95% of their Fortran or Cobol (or name your old programming language/product) experience has vanished. Thank god the software is mostly in maintenance mode, but client problems do still arise and what once took 15 mins to fix, now requires a week and phone calls to retirees begging them to help fix a client problem. They&apos;ll pay them loads of money too just for a few minutes of work.&lt;p&gt;Consultants turn out to lack the domain specific knowledge required to fix the problem.&lt;p&gt;Bottom line is that sometimes, mgt is so focused on hitting short-term financial goals, that they lose site of the big, long-term picture. Business needs less 20 something MBAs who only see this quarterly report and more managers who understand that business is a decades long proposition and that senior employees are key to maintaining an edge and passing along knowledge.</text></comment>
<story><title>Institutional memory and reverse smuggling</title><url>http://wrttn.in/04af1a</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBC</author><text>In theory some quality systems (ISO 900x etc) should help with institutional memory.&lt;p&gt;Bob has a job; he performs a series of tasks to do that job; he writes down what he does for each task, including what information (also product) comes in (and who from) and what information (also product) goes out (and who to), also including all the documentation he needs to complete for each task.&lt;p&gt;Someone else edits that puts it in the company QA manual.  In future new employees just read that documentation, and maybe do a bit of shadowing of existing employees.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that&apos;s not what happens.  What happens is that Bob has a job, but Charles (Bob&apos;s boss) writes a bunch of stuff that he thinks Bob should be doing.  And he doesn&apos;t write sentences like &quot;Set the machine for 190 degree Celsius.  Place widgets in machine when it&apos;s at temperature.  Leave widgets in machine for four hours.&quot; but he writes abstract ambiguous business speak that people can&apos;t use to actually do the job.  Then Edwin (Charles&apos;s boss) adds another bunch of stuff.  Then that gets edited into a god-awful mish-mash.  The people who did the software (with the &quot;help&quot; of Edwin) add some stuff about information.  Bob gets to work to an impenetrable document that bears little relation to his actual work flow.</text></comment>