Institutional memory has two forms: - The people who know things, - The documents people who knew things wrote that down on,
Institutional amnesia occurs as those people leave, or those documents degrade, are lost, miss-filed and so on.
This page is a story about a petrochemical plant the author had been involved with the design with. It was still operating 30 years later, but nobody could remember why it was built the way it was. The local crew could maintain and operate it, but that’s it.
This happened for a few reason: - as oil economics worsened, fewer new staff were hired - paper documentation was lost as work was transitioned to CAD/CAM - group reorganisations physically moved their office - major merger caused significant shakeup
The end effect was that after he retired in 2000s, and a few years later the company wanted to change a few things, maybe add an extra unit, remove a bottleneck, but nobody knew how the damn thing worked!
Nobody knows what documentation exists, or where it might be. Nobody knows the plant’s name (colloquial, official, which official one?, the design name?)
Which unique id should be used?
So a lot of archaeology was being done. It’s very complicated and difficult.
Interesting: over time, cultural assumptions about what should be documented, implicitly or explicitly, changed, so even understanding the documentation they do have becomes a challenge.
They wished they had a big-picture overview.
The author was contacted to consult on the “working our how this historic plant works anyway” project at a very good per hour rate!
During all the moves and so on, it had become so annoying getting hold of documentation from the central, secure, repository that engineers started just making private copies to take to contractors’ offices and not telling anybody. It made them look better to contractors too, becuase they weren’t waiting on a fax all the time.
Now he had to smuggle them back into the company, since the company believed they had the documents, but didn’t, and didn’t think he had them, but he did.
Further copies of his documents were made and deposited everywhere the system said they had a copy.
Ahahaha, there’s also some trade secrets that, as an external consultant, he’s not supposed to know… except he invented a few of them! and has names on the patents. also, the internal name don’t know what the trade secrets even are.
Reverse corporate espionage.
Moral? - Hire a range of ages of people, - Keep good records, and keep them tied to the team. physically! - i enjoy reading about this sort of work, and probably doing it??