Never seen this done effectively: it is important to be able to go back a number of years to determine the facts that were considered in arriving at a decision

John Cook says something very important:

Here are a few thoughts on institutional memory from a talk by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover.

When important decisions are not documented, one becomes dependent on individual memory, which is quickly lost as people leave or move to other jobs. In my work, it is important to be able to go back a number of years to determine the facts that were considered in arriving at a decision. This makes it easier to resolve new problems by putting them into proper perspective. It also minimizes the risk of repeating past mistakes.

I’ve never seen this done effectively. I’ve been part of business and non-profit organizations that kept good records, but I don’t recall anyone ever looking back through the records to review why a decision was made.

The only place I’ve seen this almost done correctly is with version control systems for software, such as Subversion or git. When I have to figure out a bug, I will often track it to the commit where the bug was first introduced, and reading the commit note can often help figure out what the problem was. Sadly, most programmers don’t write commit notes, or they write short commit notes that don’t mean anything. I currently work at an organization that is making a major effort to clean up its code base, and so the 4 programmers on the tech team all make an effort to write good commit notes. But this wasn’t done in the past, so if I am tracking down a bug from 2 years ago, often the commit has no note.

And of course, outside of source control for software, I’ve never seen any organization document its processes in a useful way. What I have seen is time wasted on over-documentation that no one will ever read. What is needed, of course, are very short notes that people in the future will actually read. And there has to be some reliable way to attach these notes to decisions.

I’m not sure if there is a solution to this problem. Employee turnover seems to be a problem like lack of oxygen to the brain – past a certain limit, the only solution is to die. If enough employees leave an organization in a short amount of time, future employees will be adrift without any idea why certain decisions were made, and I doubt there is any way to fix the problem.