opinion: Corporate Memory: Secrets Kept By Your Staff

As a consultant, I regularly work with new clients on their problems. I bring knowledge, experience with other clients, and skills that the client doesn't have. And it's easy to storm in and start telling the client where they're going wrong, and how to fix it. But that is a bad idea.

In House Knowledge

My clients and their staff have in-house knowledge that I don't have. I'll call this 'corporate memory.'

Let's take an example. A local systems programmer understands the steps to upgrade z/OS: they've been doing it every 2-4 years for a long time. I don't: I don't have their corporate experience. In this case, the knowledge is explicit knowledge: knowledge documented in a wiki or Confluence page.

However, there may be common issues that our systems programmer has to navigate every time z/OS is upgraded. Perhaps an application group regularly copies a load module, and they need a fresh copy of the latest. Maybe the IPLs required by z/OS must happen outside of any other changes, but there is a long queue of such changes. This is tacit knowledge: obtained through experience and handed down to incoming systems programmers.

The Value of Corporate Memory

Let's take a real-world example of how this corporate memory is invaluable, even for consultants like me. At one site, I recommended implementing CICS threadsafe. Threadsafe has been around for years and is an excellent way of making CICS programs run faster and use less CPU. I'd implemented it elsewhere and seen a reduction in CPU and response times of around 10%. Sounds great.

However, the local experts knew that their application used shared CICS memory obtained using the EXEC CICS GETMAIN SHARED. This is one of those problems with threadsafe: you need to serialise access to such shared storage. It's possible I would have found this out myself, but using the local knowledge not only told me it was being used, but why. Together, we figured out a solution: Coupling Facility Data Tables (CFDTs).

Losing This Corporate Memory

This corporate memory is an asset but doesn't appear in any balance sheet or corporate report. It's difficult to quantify, and even more difficult to estimate costs if this memory was lost. But today, many sites face this reality as experienced technical staff retire. From an HR point of view, it seems easy: just replace the retiring member with another one. But even if you can find another expert with similar skills and experience, they still won't have this corporate memory. Similarly, getting trainees in is a great idea, but they won't accumulate this corporate memory in a short time: it's usually learned over years of experience.

The secrets that internal staff hold is invaluable, and as an external consultant, I value it and leverage it whenever I can. But it's easy to undervalue its worth.

David Stephens

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