Re: Do you have a Knowledge Officer?

On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 10:28:24 -0700, Alistair <alistair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why bother with a Knowledge Officer? In my experience, the management
does not value information held in either their employees' heads or on
paper. Valued staff are let-go because they are too expensive or 'unco-
operative' (or even just people who were in place before the manager
arrived).

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In 2002, at the nadir of the dot-com depression, I was
told I could start tomorrow in Bangalore. I learned that a deluxe apartment with servant's
quarters went for less than $200 per month (it's MUCH higher now). Namaste, y'all.

Documentation is not maintained; all too often, updates are
completed with no time allotted to update documentation. So knowledge
is not important.

Wrong. Every line of code can be traced back through a Detailed Design and High Level
Design to a Business Requirement. And it can be traced forward through as many levels of
test results all the way to a User Acceptance Test.

Now that you can hire a team of Gurus with first-class degrees in
India for the price of the coffee machine in your office,

Free coffee was dropped after the last merger. Starbucks across the street takes credit
cards.

there is no
need to worry about knowledge (after all, if the guru has a 1st then
they don't need documentation).

THEY wrote the code. Don't they talk to each other?

As for Robert's 4-hour escalation in the knowledge free guru
environment: when I worked on a support team we were held to 30
minutes before being ceremonially dis-embowelled (failure was not
tolerated).

How long does it take to write a PERL script to discard bad transactions?

I once naively suggested we should at least save employee numbers from the paychecks we
were deleting. The scornful answer was "We don't have time for that. Let them complain
through the chain of command." Whoops, excuuse me.
.