Several years ago, a Swiss Government ministry was sued after it imposed a ban on travellers from Asia entering Switzerland. The reason for the ban was the outbreak of an infectious epidemic in Asia. The ministry wanted to prevent infections in Switzerland, however the ban prevented a group of Asian business people from attending a very important conference, which for them was the key business event of the year.

Legal action commenced, and in order to avoid significant financial penalties the ministry was required to provide proof of information flow and the state of knowledge during the critical days surrounding the ban. Lawyers representing the Asian business travellers were very demanding and wanted to know what the ministry knew and how that changed over time, even down to hourly incremental steps.

In quiet times each document that goes in or out of the ministry is recorded meticulously in a document management system. However, in a crisis situation such as this one, procedure goes out the window and the desks start to pile up with paper, higher and higher. Snap meetings are held, and decisions made on the fly with nobody caring to record the kind of information the lawyers were now asking. The decision process was were no longer reconstructable.

Following this experience, the ministry undertook a knowledge management project. The main objective was to create traceability for important decisions with unparalleled granularity and simplicity. We reached this goal by creating a semi-analogue and semi-digital working process.

Practically this meant working analogue with papers during the day and digitizing and filing the paper documents at night, a task undertaken by a special records management task force. Processed documents were marked and returned to crisis centre in the morning in special filing box.

Digital content tsunami

I am reminded of this project when looking at the culture in many companies. Today, there are so many tools which allow collaborators to create a tsunami of messages, be it in Teams, Slack, Email, text messages, Twitter, Office 365, SharePoint, etc. The golden rule, that decisions should be traceable, has been lost. The information that ultimately led to a decision is somewhere in the digital stream, but it typically stays hidden.

Many companies and organizations are faced with this issue. I like to call this Digital Amnesia: The thoughtless exchange of information through so many different channels that leads to a dissipation.

One loses the ability to have an overview and it is too expensive to restore order afterwards through content structuring and metadata insertion.

Digital amnesia has even more facets. With the introduction of every new application or change of the operating system more information and more documents are at risk of being lost.

Digitalization has had the unfortunate consequence that we are less and less able to discern the status of a project from the case-file at any given time. With so much information in transit through so many different channels, the ability to track the information flow is being lost. Emails are sent simultaneously to so many people in a star pattern. One recipient does not know if and what the others are doing or saying. One cannot reconstruct a logical step-wise progress.

What is ultimately needed is the thing what nobody wants to hear. Namely, some type of agreed governance, some guidelines for naming, rules how to structure the information. And the discipline to do it. This takes effort and logical work.

We expect somehow applications magically doing this for us automatically. And the software suppliers keep us promising they would do. But they don't. The AI magical fairy is not yet here.

Pavel Kraus is a knowledge management consultant and President of the Swiss Knowledge Management Forum. He also blogs regularly on KM topics HERE