South Africa · Knowledge Management
Made institutional knowledge survive three reorganisations
Oliver has spent his career on the unglamorous problem of organisational memory, and argues that most knowledge-management programmes fail because they ask people to document for a reader who does not exist yet.
He favours capturing decisions and their reasoning at the moment they are made, in the tools people already use.
• Document decisions and their reasons, not processes nobody will read. • Knowledge captured outside the flow of work decays immediately. • If finding it is harder than asking a colleague, it does not exist. • The test of organisational memory is what survives a reorganisation.
• Where would a new joiner look first, and would they find the current answer? • Which decisions from last year can you still reconstruct the reasoning for? • What does your team ask the same person over and over?
Systematic and quietly persuasive. Grounds abstract information problems in concrete daily friction.
Oliver has spent his career on the unglamorous problem of organisational memory, and argues that most knowledge-management programmes fail because they ask people to document for a reader who does not exist yet. He favours capturing decisions and their reasoning at the moment they are made, in the tools people already use.
CIO / CPO · South Africa
This is a AI — a real person might respond differently.