Expert Self-Image

At my previous organization, we carried out a detailed analysis of the impact of a privacy breach on our business. Towards the end of my time there, this actually happened. This made headlines in the technology press. I do not think our modelling was used in dealing with this but perhaps that did not matter.

I thought that i had a lot of knowledge in this area and yet very little of this has been drawn on by that organization after i left. They are still operating so I presume that they did not need it. Perhaps experts have an over-inflated view of their own value?

Protocol

At Corporate Communications, we handle visits from overseas. One person in our department is very experienced. We always go to her for protocol issues. She’s very helpful. If she leaves, we’ll have issues. She‘s been doing this for 5 years.

Empowered to Fail

I have seen instances where employees without specific skills relevant to the situation incorrectly try to diagnose problems based on what their own field of expertise. Eg a case where self directed shift crews (the crowd) were empowered to run a plant according to how they believed it should be run, but without technical understanding of the appropriate risks when unexpected circumstances occurred - unfortunately the techo's (the elite) were shifted off to the side as only support to the self directed crews (the crowd) - the glitch, the self directed shift crews (the crowd) then caused in their well meaning ignorance, when their "cygnets" unexpectedly became "black swans" instead of "white swans" ran to tens of millions of dollars to fix - some of us were then called in to clean up afterwards & were quite incredulous - to us it was entirely expected that "black swans" would result and not "white swans" ... But then the self-directed work crews (the crowd) didn't know about the existence or possibility of the "black swans" until far, far too late ... So sometimes a crowd helps, and sometimes it doesn't necessarily help and can hinder - it's about getting "all" the right people connected up via the informal networks when it is needed.

Experts mean the rest can relax

This example is about expertise being embedded in processes. We have process owners in our organisation. They write the policies and dictate the process and procedures. They are very valuable people, they know the whole business in detail and they give guidance and direction. When we need to understand a process, the systems, even the connections between systems, we know which process owner we should approach - they are identified according to business function.

Now we're trying to centralise this system and make it easier to identify who to go to for what.

There are good and bad aspects to this practice - once we identify them as process owner, then nobody else will spend the time to know the process as well as they do. Then there is a risk if/when they leave. We just hope our documentation will help in this case.

The process owners have usually got to that position through deep experience in the process previously. We don't have a system for bringing up new people with that level of experience and knowledge.

Just In Time

A few years ago our organisation did an exercise to find out what people knew. They found one person who was responsible for contributing one critical figure in the annual report. He would collect data from all over the organisation, and run it through a special algorithm that only he understood, and come out with this critical figure. He was the only person who knew how to do it, and only three people in the whole organisation knew about his role. Realising this meant we could put a risk mitigation strategy in place.

No Face to Face Handover

My former company lost five key employees within three months in the same work area. When they finally decided to do an audit of this area of the business, they found that out of a team of six people, only the most senior person was still there. They said “Oh bugger, we knew this was going to happen”. Each person who had left had drawn up job handover and knowledge transfer plans, but their replacements hadn’t been there for direct training. So we had to get three of them back on short term contracts to train their successors.

Oops... we retrenched him

Here’s a story on the financial impact of lost expertise. I was working for a newspaper company in the 1990s. At that time there were lots of strikes, the newspaper industry had been going through lots of transformations. The journalists and printers would usually strike together for maximum impact, and they usually chose a Friday, being the day that all the classified ads came out so it had a big financial impact. The managers were strike exempt, and most of them had come up from being journalists and printers themselves, so they would get together and cobble together an edition – it was not as good as the normal edition, and there would still be a financial hit, but they always managed to get an edition out. Then one Friday night, when there was a strike, they were all set for this lead manager to run the presses for them as he normally did. Then they suddenly realized he had been retrenched some weeks before, and nobody else knew how to run the presses. For the first time ever the paper didn’t come out, and there was a huge financial hit, millions of dollars. The management realized what had happened, but there was so much turmoil at the time they never learned from it. They never came up with a risk mitigation strategy.

Being Prepared

My team is called a “capability” team, and our role is to make sure we capture knowledge before critical people leave or retire.

Nobody left

Recently a bunch of senior people left. Not only did they leave but those people that they mentored have also left! The thing is that those people do not come from a high-status group within our organisation so the attitude seems to be that this doesn't matter. There's no awareness of the risk.

Outsourcing Everything?

There has been a tendency to outsource and centralise IT functions across many organisations. Sometimes this makes sense but we have a few very specialised systems where this approach doesn't make sense. It is actually a source of risk as we now do not have control over them and yet the systems aren't documented well enough for us or the outsourcers to understand the complexity.