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How can we protect our institutional memory? · Technology Now

• MICHAEL BIRD Aubrey, question for you. How long do you think the average person stays in a job? AUBREY LOVELL my goodness. I'm going to say maybe three to five years, taking a guess here. MICHAEL BIRD Hmm... How long have you been at HP for? You've been ever- AUBREY LOVELL Okay, so I am not a good sample example of this, but I've actually been with HPE or HP starting for about 15 years. MICHAEL BIRD Well, I've been HPE for six years, so nearly like nearly half your tenure. But according to a 2024 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US Department of Labor, the average number of years that a standard worker will stay in their current employees is just 3.9 years. i AUBREY LOVELL So I find it interesting that you're starting to see this change, you know, back in the day, and I feel old now because I'm like, man, if you found a really great company to work for, it's like, feel very loyal to it. Right? But now you're seeing this kind of changeover of every couple years, you you switch out, maybe you go to another company in a different industry, but definitely not what I have done in my career, MICHAEL BIRD And while most people have a handover with their replacement,. The people that leave will still take a huge amount of knowledge with them when they go. So today we're going to be looking at how to preserve this institutional knowledge. I'm Michael Bird. AUBREY LOVELL I'm Aubrey Lovell and welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD So yeah, so Aubrey, the loss of institutional memory, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as institutional amnesia. Have you heard that term before? AUBREY LOVELL I have not, but it makes sense. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, and it can be devastating to organisations. If we look at some of the man-made disasters within the last 20 years, both a major oil spill in 2010 and a run on one of Britain's biggest banks in 2007 could have been significantly mitigated if lessons from previous disasters had been appropriately preserved and learnt from. ii AUBREY LOVELL And I assume that stuff from earlier that we talked about of the average worker staying for under four years at a job makes learning lessons far harder, right? MICHAEL BIRD Oh absolutely. In fact, a 2018 report from Panopto found that 42% of institutional knowledge is individual to each employeeiii. Which-- means that someone leaving the company takes almost half of all lessons they’ve learnt with them when they go. But with knowledge comes power. The importance of institutional knowledge is well known now and companies are putting more and more measures in place to protect it, so to find out more about the importance of institutional memory and how it’s preserved, I spoke to Rom Kosla, the Chief Information Officer, or CIO, for HPE. AUBREY LOVELL But before we find out how institutional memory is preserved in modern society, I want to look back at how people used to pass on knowledge which means… ... It’s time for Technology Then. AUBREY LOVELL So obviously there are loads of ways that people have preserved knowledge across human history. Paintings, oral histories, scrolls and scriptures have all played their part in preserving our collective memory but I want to talk about something a bit more modern… well, relatively modern compared to ancient scrolls. By the 1800s, we had been producing huge numbers of written resources to preserve knowledge but here’s the issue: everyone is preserving their knowledge differently, and not necessarily in the most efficient way but in 1873, in a college library in Massachusetts, a librarian by the name of Melvyn Dewey formulated a new way of categorising booksiv, a classification system which would catch on around the world after it’s publication in 1876 in a work titled A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library.v MICHAEL BIRD Response That surname sounds familiar… AUBREY LOVELL I would hope so because nowadays, we can just go onto our smartphone or computer or whatever and search for an answer to a question we have but before that, if you wanted to learn information, you had to look it up in a book. The method of classification created by Melvyn Dewey made information easily accessible to those wishing to learn, and also allowed newly acquired knowledge to be stored in a sensible location and easier to find . The system broke all information down into 10 main categories, and continued to sub divide these categories into more and more specific topics. Michael, if we didn’t have computers and smart phones, just wanna ask this, do you think you have the patience to keep track of any questions you have so you can go and look them up in a library? MICHAEL BIRD response I spend a lot of time searching the internet for answers about things that I see, random things that I see. So I think I probably would. I'm naturally quite a curious person AUBREY LOVELL So much has improved since we have the digital age, but at the same time, I feel like we've, you know, I've just gotten so much lazier because I can just click it on my phone and I don't have to do any work. But the thing this system doesn’t account for is, of course, that people have to write down the information in the first place! MICHAEL BIRD And that lack of preserving the knowledge at all does seem to be half the problem when it comes to institutional amnesia so, to find out more about it, I spoke to Rom Kosla, the Chief Information Officer for HPE and we started by discussing what a CIO actually does on a day to day basis at a company like HPE. ROM KOSLA Day to day, would say, you know, one of the most important things is I don't want to get emails that their systems are down. So reliability, making sure that our systems are available to conduct business. You know, how we actually take quotes, how do we do orders? How do we make, move, sell? And ultimately, how do we close our books and financial processes? So every day is all about making sure that we execute and excel and what we do to drive IT capabilities for the company. But there's also the part around, how are we doing things that are driving innovation? How are we doing things that are around financial planning? How do we make sure that we're spending the company's money in the right way? So my day to day is all about ensuring as a business, as a function, that we're doing the right things for the company and we're being focused and we're not deluding all the things we could be doing that everyone wants us to do, but focused on things that really matter for the company. I obviously want to understand my business, what the business is looking to do. There's a significant amount of time where we actually work with the business to talk about the problems that they're facing. And it could be things like macroeconomics that are occurring around the world today, or it could be things that they're trying to solve for taking a product and innovating it and bring it to market. So what I like to think about is we are at a fingertips away from achieving whatever it takes to unlock the technology to deliver either disruptive technology and enablement or actually protecting our company from whatever challenges, issues, that are out there, securing our systems. MICHAEL BIRD What sorts of things do you need to consider when you're creating a strategy for such a large organisation? ROM KOSLA What I've seen and what I believe is management by walking around. And management by walking around first off is making sure that you're not insulated from what is exists out there. Walking around is also virtual, know, enabling, engaging with, with teams and engaging with your teams, not just at the direct leaders level but down to the staff down to down to our workforce and down to our partners as well as with our business and so the the abilities to have that open dialogue all the time and really understand that there's moments in in our cycle where we actually define long-term planning multi-year planning annual planning, but don't wait for when that requirement actually is required to build those documents to start talking. You got to do it throughout. It's it's a virtuous cycle. You got to constantly look for opportunities to pick up those nuggets that might actually be important to put into a planning document or a planning strategy or a financial plan that says this is how we think ROI is going be generated. MICHAEL BIRD So there's often that sort of people processes technology. How important are people in this whole process? ROM KOSLA Yep. To me within IT, the heart and soul of IT is the people. What I see all the time, and I think about this when we're doing a lot of work where there was challenge and stability when I first joined, in the amount of time people spent weekends, evenings, to ensure that the systems were stable for the business to execute their day day job, every time the systems weren't available, the business had to work late. Yes, you can get self-healing technology, but at the end of the day, at some point you need the people to actually lean in and they actually have to put sweat equity there. MICHAEL BIRD So how do you strike a balance then between, an in-house team, third party, and maybe also technology into that, you know, can you just automate all of it? ROM KOSLA So I have a philosophy. My philosophy is very much third party teams have to be a flex. The core of what we do as a company and what we have, we have to have that knowledge across every part of IT. so we start to talk about the concept of value streams. So value streams being like an end to end process flow. Could be our lead to quote, a quote to order or order to cash. And along the way we have expertise in It could be an application, could be a custom development, it could be the integration, or it could even be the hardware below it. What I'm expecting is throughout the stack and throughout the value stream, we have knowledgeable experts in IT and in the business to help ensure that we can continue to drive changes, growth, and opportunities. But I know that we can't always have enough people to do everything, so we have our flexible partners. And to me, the goal of having that partnership is our teams are always there to be the core of the knowledge and the ability to change. But when we want to flex, maybe we want to get to an exponential opportunity to drive growth. We're going to need arms and legs, deep thoughts, deep knowledge, deep skills, software expertise, and those are going to be where we leverage our vendors MICHAEL BIRD So the in-house team is the baseline? ROM KOSLA Yeah, it's the baseline, exactly. MICHAEL BIRD And actually, so when you're wanting to do something new, a big project or whatever, that's when maybe you can work with third parties. But actually, day to day, you should have this baseline and that should be in-house teams, you think. ROM KOSLA there will always be choices we make, right? And there's never like this consistent, if you kind of rub your hand across like, what is the baseline look like? It's a little bit in a rough edges because you're always gonna have a plan that says, here's what we have my teams, but then maybe the requirements change from infra to apps. And so now you have an imbalance, maybe you build too many infra teams and that we gotta do is you rebalance it. So the goal here is you wanna take those talents and you have to give them an opportunity to learn and move over. And don't want, what you don't want to do is constantly look at like, okay, I need to find externals. We have deep technology assets throughout the company. We have, again, new products that come in. The best thing we can do is cross train as many of the folks in my organization to be able to do anything. I use the terminology in my, in my team meetings around majors and minors. I said, listen, if you go to, if you go to university and you want to actually, you know, focus on finance, you should still have a minor in computer science. Or if you're a computer science major, you should have a minor in marketing and once the university is done, we should continue to work on our majors and build more minors. And so we've been using that terminology. And I think the reason why people get excited is because we have the deep opportunity with really deep engineering DNA where people can move in between technology across the staff. MICHAEL BIRD And I suppose that means that if people have more skills in certain areas, you can be pretty flexible. ROM KOSLA this is actually a great example where we looked at AI. When we first started looking at AI when I first joined, the conversation was around, we got to go fast, Rom. Therefore we got to work with a third party. And I said, I said, we're not, we're not going to do that. Before we do anything, I want to identify available people that can actually free up their work and be dedicated to this effort. And I want them to be employees and what I think has happened at least within, within our space is once we started, we accelerated faster than, than the teams has ever seen. And it was because we dedicated that time and we, and we allowed for people to to to train but they had the deep skills already is just applying it into a new technology. MICHAEL BIRD I suppose what you have there is you're building institutional knowledge ROM KOSLA Yes MICHAEL BIRD How important is institutional knowledge? ROM KOSLA Every company has to have deep knowledge in what whatever they're doing. It's similar to a grocery business, a consumer product business. There's deep IP in how that company runs. In HPE, we are a technology company. Institutional knowledge is such a big part of how we enable and unlock value. I truly believe that if we continue to drive that knowledge, both at the business side and the IT side, the amount of acceleration we can have is unbelievable. If we shortcut that institutional knowledge and say, I just want to build X without factoring the uniqueness of our company, I think we'd have to redo multiple projects multiple times. So what I see is when I look at my team and what we were able to do, what we're seeing at the breakneck speed of innovation, that capability of really adapting and learning and having that institutional knowledge is such a special sauce that, again, we're not a CPG company, but there is a special sauce involved in here. Yeah. MICHAEL BIRD And I suppose, I guess part of that is training. mean, training is such a, can be really expensive for organizations and it can sometimes feel a bit like, you know, might be a bit wasted or, know, but, it's, training. I mean, does it bring long-term benefits training or stuff? ROM KOSLA I think what I push back a lot is the certification process. I think that's out there. I think people think of this as like, you put a certification on your resume and then that's really important. I actually think of this as you need to have micro learning and you have to have hands-on experience. And training allows us to say, look, you may not get formally trained, but you have enough experience and there's some micro learnings that you can have, but we want you to actually put some sweat equity in an area and you're gonna learn from doing the work. And then from there, I want you to teach the other people around. So there's really an opportunity for us to be not just learners, but also people who can actually go and enable that new learning to other folks. MICHAEL BIRD Is there a data sovereignty element to this? know, if you have your own staff working on your own systems with your own data, does that make that sort of company data stuff that's sensitive? Does that make that process easier as well? ROM KOSLA I think there might be, I think there's definitely a value of understanding and contextualizing that information faster with your own staff. You gotta imagine if you're bringing in new people all the time, you're constantly training other companies to get good at no-winner systems. And it's a repeatable task that you never get value from. You just constantly pay for that onboarding. My view is when you have that knowledge in-house and they understand the context, the data, the potential privacy, you bypass weeks if not months of onboarding and offboarding. the acceleration is basically you have the depth of the skills and the capability of the work. MICHAEL BIRD And how does the speed and frequency of disruption in the tech sector play into the sort of wider dynamic of in-house third parties? ROM KOSLA I think a lot of CIOs ask the question, should I build something? Should I buy something? My answer is always look at the pants, right? In my prior roles where engineering depth was scarce, right? You're required to leverage as much third party as possible. You might have to buy more. And your role is really to govern the overarching solutions and how they fit together. We're able to build micro-functionaries into solutions that really drive huge value. And we can actually code the systems directly. And we also innovate with our product teams. You should build more, but be purposeful. Don't build for the sake of, I have the skills. I always tell my team, look, if you're passionate about building, make sure it has a value, it has an ROI. And two, we're willing to sustain it long-term. can't just be off the, you know, we build it, put it on the shelf. Now let's move on to the next initiative. I don't actually believe in that. As a CIO, I want to make sure we protect every dollar and drive every value that's there and not waste it. MICHAEL BIRD And how does work in HPE differ from your previous roles in this regard? ROM KOSLA I would say that in IT and many companies out there, there's unsung heroes in IT. They're out there and they're working day in and day out and they're never shown the spotlight. It's always one of those things where, it's not saying it's a thankless job. think people do thank IT folks. And they see them as value because, we see technology today and how, how pervasive, how disruptive it is, but the IT folks don't get the spotlight because ultimately the other day, the products that the sell are the spotlight in here. We're spotlighting the technology. We're spotlighting the products. And because we're customer gold, we get to show what we're doing. And because of that, people want to hear from us. And so being, being in another industry and joining technology industry, I wasn't prepared for that. I was in. MICHAEL BIRD So can you use AI to preserve the institutional knowledge of an organization, do you think? ROM KOSLA yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that we see and I've seen this throughout my career is we produce content like crazy. I'm sure every company builds, you know, PowerPoints, Word documents, PDFs everywhere. What happens when you have petabytes of data is that you don't actually know the relationship of that data to a problem. So yeah, what I believe AI will do is similar to how the web or the internet generated huge insights. but that indexing the ability to really be individualistic about the answers that you want with the data that you have and secure it, that is the knowledge base that I think we've been looking for for many years. MICHAEL BIRD And are we doing this already? ROM KOSLA Yes, we are. are. fact, do. One of the things I'm really proud of is we implemented what we call our chat HPE. And this capability is tied to both what we have built in house, but enabling our product called PCAI or private cloud AI. And with that technology, we are now able to be purposeful about the data we're accessing, securing that data, pointing to it and making sure that that data is reserved for the purpose of that team or the individual. And what we've been able to showcase within the business is that you can trust that system to be, to never move out of our domain. It's within HPE's data center or a colo or private cloud. And if you want to, you have access to the cloud and those queries that you want to do, you can go out and really leverage scale. But if you really want privacy and you also want scale, but you don't want to move that data, you have the option to do that. And I think that's really the, the interesting part. And we've seen a lot of use cases around that. AUBREY LOVELL Wow, that was a good conversation, Michael. I feel like I have so many thoughts and I think my first thought is really around companies need to pay attention to this, right? When you think about institutional knowledge, it is almost like a secret weapon. And if you're not doing enough to keep your people, then the training and the knowledge that you are giving to onboarding and to all these things is just going out to your competitors. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, Rom said something along the lines of like, you're training other companies to understand your company better or to understand your company. by using third parties. But I suppose also if you're not holding onto your staff, then there's an element of that as well. Like you're training people up and they're leaving AUBREY LOVELL Mm-hmm. MICHAEL BIRD I like what he said about majors and minors. Don't just specialise in one thing, be like a well-rounded person AUBREY LOVELL Yeah, agreed. And I think that's even more important nowadays when you look at the training programs that you have in companies and big businesses, right? We used to have this thing back in the day called reverse mentoring, where it was just as important for like people that have been super experienced and have been with a company for a long time to train newer hires or younger career hires in the company. But at the same time, you're opening up that road of information for also the new hires or maybe early career employees to give them knowledge MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. And I suppose, you know, focusing on IT teams, one of the things Rom said was the heart and soul of IT is its people. And I think that I found that a really interesting term because I think most people would think the heart and soul of IT is the technology, the sort of the stuff that sits in our racks. AUBREY LOVELL Yeah, totally. Because think about it. Technology is nothing without people. People are the ones that do the inputs that create the formulas that build it. And so when you have the right people in place and you have the right culture, I mean, you're going to have a fabulous, you know, technology fabric. And it's just, it's really just interesting to see the progression of that and what people are doing to keep that in house. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, yeah, I think there's a big element to that. then just one little tidbit that was at the end, he talked about chat HPE, which Aubrey, we're doing an episode on that. At some point, we're working on it. An episode about chat HPE, which is an in-house AI chatbot that we have. AUBREY LOVELL We do, we use it all the time. MICHAEL BIRD Now, Rom is the CIO here at HP, so he does have us finger on the pulse of the technology world. So, Aubrey, I thought it would be good to finish our interview with asking him where he sees the future of the world of technology going. ROM KOSLA Yeah, for me, think what's next is, I mean, obviously AI is what's next and, agentic is what's next. But the part that I think that I believe it is going to be help enable is that every function, every business, every software company is trying to build their own agentic capability. And to me, the orchestration of that within a company is the real frontier. And what we're trying to solve for as an IT function is Let's get ahead of that because as we know, every software vendor is going to try their best to sell us agentic capabilities. We need to make sure that it fits into that value stream capability that we have and make sure that everything actually integrates well together. And so that we can have seamless experience, unbelievable capabilities and happy users and ultimately value as we generate, you know, whatever value that we're looking for at each function. AUBREY LOVELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Rom Kosla, And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is hosted by Aubrey Lovell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Allison Gaito, Alissa Mitry and Renee Edwards. AUBREY LOVELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!