The World Bank at 60: A Case of Institutional Amnesia?

57559 Resource 214 21 21 1095471291809 1242930305781 Controlled Corporate Amnesia: Many, Small KM Failures

People often associate corporate amnesia with the departure of senior or long-standing staff members, but there's another, more pervasive, source of organizational memory leak.

It is easy to find examples [<a target="_blank" href="http://www.irn.org/programs/finance/wb_at_60.pdf">1</a>][<a target="_blank" href="http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=3465&t=organizations">2</a>] 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, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.hr.com/HRcom/index.cfm/WeeklyMag/6D874FC3-10B6-4D33-A44D508977DA0BDC?ost=wmBizSavvy">Best of Biz Savvy: Corporate Amnesia</a>, Jason Weir, senior HR.com researcher, describes this simpler, more common form of corporate forgetting: <blockquote> "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." </blockquote> In other words, this common form of corporate amnesia results from a failure to achieve what I recently referred to as a <a target="_blank" href="item/53612">Holy Grail</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="item/10801">knowledge capture</a>, persistence, and transfer. But, a single weblog does not an enterprise KM solution make. [<a target="_blank" href="item/9143">3</a>] 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.richardhaleshawgroup.com/">Richard Hale Shaw Group</a>, for example, earlier this year set up a project blogsite to manage a consulting engagement with participants physically located in three different states. <a target="_blank" href="http://joshholmes.com/">Josh Holmes</a>, a lead consultant involved in the project, recently pinged me in IM... <blockquote> 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! </blockquote> I followed up by asking <a target="_blank" href="http://www.richardhaleshawgroup.com/RHSGroup/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=99&tabid=11#RHS">Richard Hale Shaw</a> 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. 9 application/xml false corporate amnesia holy grail Josh Holmes KM failure KM failures organizational memory Richard Hale Shaw The World Bank at 60: A Case of Institutional Amnesia? A Critical Look at the Implementation of the Bank's Infrastructure Action Plan http://www.irn.org/programs/finance/wb_at_60.pdf Harvard Business School: Thanks for the (Corporate) Memories When employees leave, vital institutional knowledge may be lost forever. http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=3465&t=organizations A Holy Grail: Effective Knowledge Capture, Persistence, Enhancement, and Transfer Since the 1980s, the connotation of "knowledge management" morphed from exciting technology business opportunity to an idea that largely failed, in commercial terms, anyway. But the underlying need for KM has not gone away; in fact, it has grown. item/53612 Are You Blogging Yet? What do NPR, Google, InformationWeek, Jupitermedia, InfoWorld, and the New York Times have in common? item/9143 Can a blog post contain knowledge? At the risk of oversimplifying: Yes! item/10801 SRT Solutions: Demo Blogsite SRT Solutions maintains a public demonstration blogsite. http://www.srtsolutions.com/demoblogsite.htm 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. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 190014 false false true false false false true 227713 Resource 190014 173239 173239 1236254526568 1236254526568 Controlled RE: Corporate Amnesia: Many, Small KM Failures

New book addressing corporate amnesia

Title: Knowledge Management: Begging for a Bigger RolePublisher: Business Expert Press.<a href="http://www.businessexpertpress.com/node/31">http://www.businessexpertpress.com/node/31</a> E-book Price: $15.00In Stock Date: December 15, 2008.Year of Copyright: 2008.Number of Pages: 100.E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-60649-020-4.E-book ISBN-10: 1-60649-020-6.URL: <a href="http://www.businessexpertpress.com/node/70">http://www.businessexpertpress.com/node/70</a>  Outline: Conceived just 15 years ago, Knowledge Management (KM) is perhaps the single business discipline about which managers know least. Having spent pots of money investing in the creation of corporate knowledge, the benefits are still marginal. Now that the boom times are temporarily over, it is perhaps timely that KM can be more fully exploited for it conceals an application indispensable for the foreseeable struggle ahead. Recessions conventionally mean drawing in one’s horns but what if there was another way through the minefield? The neglected KM application this tract will address is the late Peter Drucker’s declared crisis of productivity, his belief being that businesses and other types of organization are largely wasteful in their production. Based on his two books on the subject, this author will uphold the extent of Drucker’s alert (managers, for example, are turning in productivity growth scores lower than before formal mass business education was introduced) and outline how, through two misconceived and under-exploited processes of KM, employers can learn to work more efficiently.The processes are the better management of their Organizational Memory (OM) and employer-instigated Experiential Learning which, together, can reduce the pandemic of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter many parts of modern industry and commerce. All aided and abetted by the perceived champion of the workplace, the flexible labor market, which has introduced to industry and commerce the phenomenon of conveyer-belt jobs discontinuity and associated corporate amnesia, the two most corrosive components to good decision-making. Addressing the limitations of conventional approaches, it takes KM to the next level. Author Biography:  Arnold Kransdorff was the first to identify the phenomenon of corporate amnesia in the early 1980s, soon after the flexible labor market started to make a significant impact on jobs tenure. His first book on the subject (“Corporate Amnesia”, Butterworth Heinemann, 1998) was short listed for the UK’s “Management Book of the Year” in 1999 and selected as one of 800 titles worldwide to launch Microsoft Reader eBooks program in 2000. His second book (“Corporate DNA”, Gower, 2006) expanded the subject to explain how organizations could help their transient managers apply captured knowledge and experience in the cause of better decision-making.An expert practitioner in Knowledge Management and the leading authority on the consequences of the flexible labor market, his unique speciality is the management of Organizational Memory (OM), the institution-specific know-how accrued from experience that characterises any organization's ability to perform. His work is widely published in academic journals, trade journals and the national press. He has project managed and edited more than a dozen corporate histories, the most efficient vehicle for capturing long-term OM, and pioneered the development of oral debriefings, the equally efficient verbal vehicle to capture short- and medium-term OM. A former financial analyst and industrial commentator for the Financial Times in London, he has won several national and international awards, among them Industrial Feature Writer of the Year (1981) and an Award of Excellence (1997) from Anbar Management Intelligence, the world's leading guide in management journal literature. He has co-supervised a US doctoral thesis on OM, is a guest lecturer at many UK and overseas business schools and a regular speaker at international business conferences. He has assisted in the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce's Inquiry on “Tomorrow's Company”, the Economic and Social Research Council -commissioned study on “Management Research”, the Confederation of British Industry's deliberations on “Flexible Labour Markets” and the Washington, DC-based Corporate Leadership Council’s study on “New Tools for Managing Workforce Stability”.   10 application/xml true Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB5; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 80.225.175.111 false true false false true 214 blog blogsite/MySTHome/web