Anticlue

The Brain Drain

A company's most vital asset is the tacit knowledge. Knowing what has occurred, why items are the way they are, and applying the ways to resolve and fix these problems in the future. This unwritten, undocumented operational knowledge is often what runs the business.

The other item is that not everyone knows this knowledge, only a couple of people here and there. The well of operational knowledge continues to run dry as companies change. The really surprising item is that even though this is a continuous process, there are few to minimal proactive measures to keep the tanks filled and not lose this vital knowledge.

It is a very expensive endeavor to try to gleam the business rules from lines of code.

One simple proactive solution would be to encourage sharing knowledge organizational mentality instead of the alternative of hording the knowledge within oneself for job security.