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I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones wer

I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s. However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures. Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Spot on. This is self inflicted debt and pain from not valuing what you enumerated. And now it will cost even more to rebuild that muscle memory.
Aurornis 2y ago
> Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Some of this infrastructure in NYC is old enough that there likely isn’t anyone alive who remembers what went there. Not to mention the fact that NYC is orders of magnitude bigger than a hospital complex. Good luck finding anyone who worked on that exact section decades ago, even if they were still alive. > Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril. There is no possible way a city could store their institutional knowledge spanning more than a century within employees. Institutional knowledge is how they got into this problem, not a solution.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The drawings should exist though - they should have been created and kept. Someone should be in prison if they were destroyed (including via accidental fire - keep backups is important for paper as much as electronic data!) Where drawings don't exist the city should demand they be created.
- deltarholamda 2y ago
  Well, FWIW, the campus I'm familiar with has been around long enough that it has outlived many employees. And yet the institutional knowledge remains. Not sure where you get the idea that I think the answer is solely institutional knowledge as you seem to imply. It is but a part of the whole solution, which includes record keeping, standard practices, etc. The articles shows a single example of a more persistent problem plaguing NYC. Not being able to deal with 500 feet of water and sewer in 10 years and millions upon millions of dollars indicates a deep problem, and there is no acceptable excuse for it. NYC has kicked the can down the road for a long time, and now they are paying the price for that. My issue is that many places and institutions have been doing this as well, and it will bite us in the ass.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Spot on. This is self inflicted debt and pain from not valuing what you enumerated. And now it will cost even more to rebuild that muscle memory.

Aurornis 2y ago

> Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Some of this infrastructure in NYC is old enough that there likely isn’t anyone alive who remembers what went there. Not to mention the fact that NYC is orders of magnitude bigger than a hospital complex. Good luck finding anyone who worked on that exact section decades ago, even if they were still alive. > Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril. There is no possible way a city could store their institutional knowledge spanning more than a century within employees. Institutional knowledge is how they got into this problem, not a solution.

bluGill 2y ago
The drawings should exist though - they should have been created and kept. Someone should be in prison if they were destroyed (including via accidental fire - keep backups is important for paper as much as electronic data!) Where drawings don't exist the city should demand they be created.
deltarholamda 2y ago
Well, FWIW, the campus I'm familiar with has been around long enough that it has outlived many employees. And yet the institutional knowledge remains. Not sure where you get the idea that I think the answer is solely institutional knowledge as you seem to imply. It is but a part of the whole solution, which includes record keeping, standard practices, etc. The articles shows a single example of a more persistent problem plaguing NYC. Not being able to deal with 500 feet of water and sewer in 10 years and millions upon millions of dollars indicates a deep problem, and there is no acceptable excuse for it. NYC has kicked the can down the road for a long time, and now they are paying the price for that. My issue is that many places and institutions have been doing this as well, and it will bite us in the ass.