Alan Luks <luksa@cbs.curtin.edu.au> in LO14761 asked:
> does anyone have any thoughts/articles/references on the
> loss of organisational knowledge and/or culture as a result of
> downsizing,
There's another, more subtle form of knowledge loss that occurs in normal
company activities. A typical scenario: to solve a problem, some
mechanisms and/or policies are created, tried out, and made part of the
business routine. After a time, the reasons that led to their creation no
longer apply, but the "analysis and design" knowledge has been lost, and
people are afraid to change the routine (or don't even think of it). As a
software engineer, I've seen this happen in several cases, where the
residue of a considerable amount of analysis and design work is a program
with no valid documentation, used according to rote, and acting almost
more as an impediment to getting work done than as an aid.
I suspect that an important part of LO practice in the "steady state"
would be devoted to fighting this kind of "knowledge entropy".
Don Dwiggins "Man can make System great,
SEI Information Technology but System cannot make Man great"
ddwiggins@sei-it.com -- Confucius
--dwig@MONTEREY.std.com (Don Dwiggins)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>