What is the background?

• It is an easily observed phenomenon that some people have s--- for brains (sfb). Several celebutants who have crashed and burned lately come immediately to mind. You don't need links to their stories. Go to People or its ilk.
  
  
• When you have invested over a decade in a job and you mostly enjoy working at the company, you start to take ownership in it. You not only want it to exceed, you want it to excel.
  
  This company uses immense amounts of technology in providing the services to its clients -- some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. Its technology is best of breed.
  
  
• I have decades of experience of working with computer technology. A goodly portion of that time has been working with information presentation.

So where is this all going?

We have an elaborate system for managing projects. One of the collateral results is some documentation of what changes were made to our software.

We have a group whose mission is to document everything for clients. They do a good job. There is some internal documentation. But there is all that information between ears of the techno-workers.

Some of that stuff makes its way into emails. Because there are no tools for storing and organizing information on an ad hoc basis, most people use the email system (Lotus Notes) for storing this information. Because, like all people in this kind of environment, we don't have enough time to keep our electronic plates clean, there is a buildup of e-dross and e-lint -- flotsam and jetsam of the electronic age.

The solution?

Some SFB has decided to enforce a one year retention policy on email. To do this as efficiently as possible less than 8 weeks notice was given.

Sampling the planning of my co-workers, the headline in the Wall Street Journal should read

Company jettisons intellectual property - disdains backup

[I'm out of time for this post. More later.]