Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I recount my first knowledge management effort in the early 1980s. Premise: knowledge cost resources, so save it.

I was a newly graduated engineer in 1980. The US government sent me to the end of the earth to maintain electronic equipment. We had a lot of that stuff, and it failed fairly often. Pull it out of the rack, open the top, find the bad component, replace it, put it back in the rack.

This was a time consuming process. You saw a symptom, you read the maintenance manual, you looked at this, you looked at that, AHA! Here is the trouble. Fix and move on.

Being young, naive, and trying to help our Federal government save money…I had a brilliant idea. Let’s keep records of all this. My first knowledge management project was born. We got a few stacks of 5″x7″ cards and a wooden box to hold them. Each card corresponded to a piece of equipment. If the equipment failed, we pulled the card, wrote the symptoms, the key page of the maintenance manual, and the fix. We had a record of maintenance on each piece of equipment and how to fix that equipment.

Save time. Save money. Good stuff.

The fundamental premise was that the knowledge gained in any one equipment repair cost the government money to obtain. Let’s save what we could of that knowledge so that we wouldn’t spend the money again on the same work.

We implemented the system. I used it. Few other engineers used it. Why not? Read the next post on job insecurity.