4
LEAVING A TRACE
We would all like to make our mark on the world but for most of us this has been an unlikely hope. What we know and what we have learned from our work has been largely kept to ourselves. Until now.
Let’s face it – most of us pass through a day, a month, perhaps even a whole career at work, without leaving much of a trace. We might write emails and reports but most of these get buried in the sea of information produced in the day to day of modern work and get stored on computer servers in “repositories” never to be seen again. When we leave our organizations, or even move between departments, there is usually little to indicate what we did, why, and what the point was.
It was with the ultimate irony that in the week that I left the BBC I found myself being asked to take part in a senior level meeting to discuss “how to prevent knowledge leaving the organization”. However, unlike most other people leaving at the time, I did leave a trace. All of the blog posts, forum conversations, and wiki contributions I had made over the previous eight years or so were still there, and would continue to be available as long as the systems were left running. Indeed, unlike the usual traces left in formal business documentation, these online conversations contained much more of me, what I thought, what and how I decided, and what I cared about. I had, in other words, left a trace of my passing.
Much has been made of the business benefits of “knowledge retention”. Organizations ...
