It is easy to find examples [1][2] where corporate amnesia has cost organizations billions of dollars. Such stories often span several years, even decades, and involve changes in management teams, key individuals, organizational structure, and so on. But corporate amnesia is not limited to spectacular examples involving massive loss. Simple, day-to-day forgetting also carries costs—wasted time, reduced quality, missed opportunities, and of course, money. In, Best of Biz Savvy: Corporate Amnesia, Jason Weir, senior HR.com researcher, describes this simpler, more common form of corporate forgetting:

"Corporate amnesia can also be caused by failure to capture, retain, and manage existing knowledge, data, and records within an organization. As opposed to corporate amnesia caused by organizational cost-saving, staff reduction measures, this flavor of the “ailment” is more cultural by nature and is typically easier to treat."

In other words, this common form of corporate amnesia results from a failure to achieve what I recently referred to as a Holy Grail for KM: effective knowledge capture, persistence, enhancement, and transfer.

A couple years ago, Bill French and I began experimenting with what we now call the Blogsite Framework—an application framework based on the MySmartChannels Weblog Application Server. The idea for the Blogsite Framework began with recognizing that a weblog offers numerous benefits in terms of low-friction knowledge capture, persistence, and transfer. But, a single weblog does not an enterprise KM solution make. [3] On the other hand, a federation of weblogs (channels, technically) brought together in a secure, unifying interface (a blogsite), with supporting elements such as search, granular permissions, extensible business logic plug-ins, discrete XML addressability, e-mail interfaces, MS-Office integration, SOAP interfaces, and so on, can make an enterprise solution.

One blogsite application that has proven to be quite effective at enhancing corporate memory is the project blogsite—a secure collaboration space where team members capture, enhance, and leverage the project knowledge that might otherwise be forgotten. The Richard Hale Shaw Group, for example, earlier this year set up a project blogsite to manage a consulting engagement with participants physically located in three different states. Josh Holmes, a lead consultant involved in the project, recently pinged me in IM...

Josh Holmes: I thought that you'd like this bit of confirmation of the project blogsite. For the past week or so, most of the issues that [the client] has raised have been answered by linking back to the original post where they told me to do X and they are now telling me to do Y.
Josh Holmes: I'm liking it.
Andy Seidl: That's the idea.
Josh Holmes: I've also been able to link back to where I asked questions months ago and point out that they still haven't answered them.
Josh Holmes: Anyway, I thought that you'd get a kick out of it.
Andy Seidl: Yes, thanks!

I followed up by asking Richard Hale Shaw about his experience using the project blogsite in a real world setting. Richard told me, "Corporate amnesia was just what I was concerned about when we began a 10-month contract to build a web-based system for integrating a series of mainframe- and middleframe-based crime databases for an association of Police and Criminal Investigation Agencies. I had a belief that a few minor cultural changes, in terms of our KM habits, would result in big payoffs. As CEO, I was able to insist that everyone involved in the project try using the project blogsite. There was a little resistance, at first, but soon everyone was participating and the entire project went very smoothly. The result really confirmed my initial belief. There's no question in my mind that we'll continue to use project blogsites in the future."

Corporate amnesia, in its most common form, is an ailment resulting from the cumulative effect of numerous, seemingly insignificant, day-to-day forgetting events, each of which represents a small KM failure. The cure, of course, is numerous, seemingly insignificant, day-to-day remembering events. For that, we need effective (i.e., pervasive, low-friction, secure, discoverable, etc.) mechanisms for knowledge capture, persistence, enhancement, and transfer—KM's Holy Grail.