Enterprise Amnesia: Organizations Have Lost Their Minds

Well actually, organizations have never had a mind, but nonetheless, their lack of recognizing the obvious is embarrassing, or worse … life threatening.

When an organization misses the obvious (e.g., when other relevant information is trapped elsewhere in their organization) and then takes incorrect action – one might call this "Enterprise Amnesia" – or simply forgetting what was known or should have been known.

Sometimes enterprise amnesia is embarrassing, for example, when a retailer hires a person who had already been arrested for stealing from them.

Sometimes enterprise amnesia is more than embarrassing … it is tragic. For example: In Victoria, British Columbia, Sherry Charlie, an infant, was placed into the foster care of her uncle despite the fact he was known to be a violent criminal. Sherry Charlie was beaten to death less than a month later. [Story Here]

Generally, enterprise amnesia goes unnoticed. When it is noticed, it usually comes following a forensic review – like after the building falls over or after the bank has been scammed out of millions. Following such a disaster, each data custodian often interrogates his own pile of data to unearth its sheltered facts. Applying the 20-20 hindsight rule, these unconnected dots appear to have been so obvious. Unfortunately, such latent discovery of the obvious leads to congressional hearings, newspaper headlines or the risk of jail time for corporate executives (especially in this post-Sarbanes-Oxley world).

[Side bar: The story line after such a revelation often leads to the same outcry … "better information sharing". Then, despite such mandates, nothing actually happens of any significance. This is primarily due to the fact that the information sharing paradox prevents the problem from being solved directly because information sharing cannot be solved without first solving enterprise discovery – knowing first who to ask for what.]

Enterprise amnesia is the big "why?" behind many mishaps. Countries deport their own citizens by accident. Patients get the wrong procedure. Disaster relief funds are remitted to victims not once but in triplicate. Marketers send promotional materials to those they have already arrested. And so on.

[Another side bar: All too often, when an organization responds to a specific amnesia event, they simply engineer another brittle piece of infrastructure (e.g., hardwiring the foster care applicant system into the violent criminals database) only to later realize they have another amnesia event (e.g., not correlating foster care applicant system with the known pedophile or sexual offender database).]

Turns out the only way to solve enterprise amnesia in a real-time and scalable fashion requires perpetual analytics and persistent context.

OTHER RELATED POSTS:

Enterprise Intelligence – My Presentation at the third Annual Web 2.0 Summit

Information Sharing: Got Directory?

Comments

[FICO]

There is another aspect to enterprise amnesia - the loss of know-how when people leave or retire. I blogged about a great example of this (http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/09/using_knowledge.html) but with the impending retirement of the baby boomers this is going to become a critical issue for companies.
JT
http://www.edmblog.com

[Lasalle Gebbie]

Classic case of enterprise amnesia on the part of St John ambulance in New Zealand. It was recently reported in the NZ Herald http://www.nzherald.co.nz/location/story.cfm?l_id=117&objectid=10431993
that a grieving mother received a demand for payment for two ambulance rides taken by her son only days after he passed away.

The St John computer system failed to pick up a change of address after a number of moves by the son, and therefore notify Baycorp [credit and debt recovery agency] that he had died. "We didn't connect they were the same person, so neither of us knew he had died."

I took the liberty of forwarding St John this link and urged someone to take the time to read the article and/or contact you.

I have received a response advising my email had been forwarded to their Corporate Services department for consideration.

[CPR Techniques for Babies and Children]

Wow, I’ve heard of Enterprise Amnesia and didn’t think much of it considering issues usually tend to be minor, but placing an infant in the care of and uncle who has known violent behavior and then beating the infant to death is unforgivable...