Does Institutional Memory Exist?

By nicole_guerra October 9, 2007

Or better put, does it matter anymore?
We often speak of institutions as having an intrinsic value that is very much bound up in its institutional memory, that collection of data and information that tends to pool when an entity has been established over a period of time.

According to Dave Pollard, we need to rethink whether this idea is valuable anymore, given the now extremely short shelf life of information and the increased the value of context as opposed to content.
He suggests we need to reassess many aspects of the way businesses and other institutions are managed, which he sees as holdovers from an era when data itself and raw knowledge were more necessary. He declares that we stubbornly refuse to accept these realities of the current economy.

I found myself nodding in agreement with several points in Pollard’s article. I’d like to know what you all think.
These ideas aren’t exactly new, but if taken seriously in more than just a theoretical sense, they could have serious implications for academia, the way we structure curricula, and many other aspects of how universities are run.