It’s crazy to see that someone who knows the company inside and out and has years of experience can be let go just like a newbie. How did we get to a place where tenure and expertise don’t matter at all?
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Our manager tried to claw back institutional knowledge historically hoarded by a team member. That person felt her livelihood was threatened and left the bank. The clawback attempt backfired.
@gv Not only am I not going to share, but I'm going to actively sabotage the groups trying to get information from me in the name of "cross-fuctional". These are the compeitors I'm being actively compared to in stack ranking, afterall. I have no incentive to help any other individual or team attempt to catch up with me.
I'd be happy with group knowledge at this point. A point where all the teams in a group knows what each other is doing and stops duplicating efforts or at least tries to understand how their actions effect things downstream as well as the users.
I know a guy just reached out his old boss ,who's displaced few years back, to find out how certain things work, after email going round and round, adding A,B,C,D,E... to the email chain and no one has any clue. I was very impressed his old boss actually give him very detail information how's everything working.
@e2 Fair point, but it shouldn’t be devalued completely.
To be fair, some of this institutional knowledge may benefit from a refresh.
the company is too far gone to care about doing things consistently
it's day by day now
Institutional knowledge encompasses understanding how all the intricate processes were shoe‑horned together to create the bank's current operations. It is the deep insight into how those processes were designed and interwoven, and how risk is truly controlled across the legacy MIDE/MODE data‑silo smokestacks. This includes knowing which manager owns and protects a "creative" fix that keeps a fragile part of the stack running.
Now, those same processes and fixes are being pushed onto platforms, migrated to the cloud, documented, reverse‑engineered, and automated. In the quest for the digital bank, the architecture itself—not a political manager or back‑room facilitator—increasingly "knows" how things connect and which paths a process will take.
Institutional knowledge also includes the bank's understanding of its customers: their behaviors, needs, the risks they pose, and what drives product usage. In the digital environment, more of this is captured directly from customer activity and stored in the cloud as data and models, rather than residing solely in a manager's head.
Therefore, institutional knowledge does not "go away"—it gets moved and transformed. It is gradually shifted from long‑tenured employees into documented flows, data stores, AI models, and orchestration logic. This migration from the manager to the machine is precisely where things can break if leadership overestimates how much has been captured. The danger is that leaders act as if all that institutional knowledge has already been safely encoded, long before it actually has been, and then remove the people who could fix what the documentation and models missed.
Institutional Knowledge has meant nothing to those who understand why it exists for a long time. If you require long standing institutional knowledge to function then are serious flaws in that group’s capabilities and cross-training/knowledge sharing.
Institutional knowledge. Means nothing. Make sure your direct manager values you and they rank you accordingly. If you are someone that feels that your institutional value is > than what Leadership sees you as…..you will not be saved. As others have said depending on your “future value and Skills” that is all that matters. Sometimes institutional knowledge is stale and old news.
They don't care about the long term damage they are doing. They only care about getting those efficiency ratios down and they'll "cross that bridge" when they get to it, only to find it collapsed into a pile of rubble. It will be someone elses problem in a few years.
Long tenure and deep expertise can become a liability given the current direction of this organization. The sole objective is to temporarily maximize personal portfolio value — by any means necessary, including destructive and toxic methods — then, decouple and leave for good, just before the company collapses as a consequence of these actions.