Problem

Organizations have amnesia. They establish processes, but forget why. They build products, but scramble to remember how. Decisions, reasons, analysis, if written or recorded, are often lost or difficult to find. This problem is exponential, multiplied by both the number and tenure of members that have ever contributed to the org, present or gone.

This is a major problem to “orgs” of all sizes, whether a team of students tackling a capstone project, a set of scientists researching the next breakthrough, or a company tackling business objectives.

Why does this happen?

• Critical information is simply not recorded.
  • In organizations there are a lot of things to get done, and action often supersedes documentation.
  • Quality documentation is annoying. No one likes taking notes when they are supposed to be solving a problem. A structured, understandable write-up is far slower than short hand to be read solely by the implementer later.
  • Knowing what should be recorded & shared is confusing. Standards are rarely established and often un-enforced. No-one wants a cluttered knowledge base (see next point), so they may stick to personal documentation.
  • Occasionally critical thoughts are written incorrectly, corrupting the knowledge that is known or available.
• Maintaining an organized data store is difficult.
  • Placing information in the correct location is time-intensive. One must know, then find the correct location. Failure at both points results in docs placed in incorrect, unhelpful locations where they cannot be naturally found, if they are placed at all.
  • It is extremely onerous to fix an already cluttered & disorganized data store. Designing a proper data store for the group, then understanding and placing each piece of knowledge takes countless man hours.
• Search is not all powerful.
  • Search is a critical component of good organizational memory retrieval, but you need to somewhat know what you’re searching for. Sometimes the organization needs to retrieve memory it doesn’t know it needs.
  • Over-reliance on search exacerbates the other issues — leading to more cluttered & disorganized systems of poorly documented information.
  • Knowledge base search isn’t that good, yet. Searching documentation often grabs the words, but lacks the context to be useful. One search triggers another, and another - as even someone who knows that they are looking for fails to find what magical set of information that will help them achieve their goals.
  • Ultimately, search cannot compensate for a lack of information or context present.

Solution

Solutions to improve organizational memory must solve the above problems.

• Documenting critical information must be natural & seamless.
• Establishing, organizing, and maintaining the data store must be simple or automatic.
• Search should be enhanced and empowered.

To summarize, it must be simple to both store and retrieve memories of the organization.

Incumbent & Emerging Solutions

There are currently a few different methods at solving this problem, both incumbent & emerging. They solve parts of the problem, or none at all.

Incumbent Solutions

• Content/Cloud Storage Platforms
  • Microsoft OneDrive + Ecosystem, Google Drive, Notion, Atlassian, etc.
  • These are the platforms content is usually created or stored. They are usually “dumb” services, that are incentivized to have you place your solutions in their ecosystem, and no more. At most they have a working, but unsatisfactory search mechanism.
  • Many of these solutions are trying to become smarter, but they tend to be silo’d, and not AI first.
• “Knowledge Base” Solutions
  • Zendesk, Hubspot, Zoho Desk, Intercom, etc.
  • These solutions are mainly focused on answering your customers’ questions. They are more focused on structure and actually generating content to manage your customers, and not focused on the actual retention of the company itself.
  • These in and of themselves are tools to be used, actually compounding more to the memory management issue than fixing it.
• Enterprise Search
  • Elastic, Google Cloud Search, Lucidworks, Coveo
  • These solutions are generally high quality search providers for data spread across organization tools. They are quite effective for this use case, and many are evolving to become AI search & Insights providers. Unfortunately, these tools tend to be inaccessible by most groups, only accessible by the largest of corporations. They tend to only be as good as the content you have available.