No one ever fills someone else's shoes exactly. I know I have specialized in certain areas that my predecessor ignored and work in my specialized area was lost. Consider by way of example the following three case histories. 1 One large consulting company admitted that they could locate only 20 percent of their electronic files for their company products. This company produces millions of pages of information.
Information is, in fact, one of their products.
But they didn't treat it that way. Imagine having employees and management throw away 80 percent of their own product on a regular basis. Another sorry sight was the large moving box filled with diskettes that someone pulled out and showed me. Somewhere, she explained, in a spreadsheet file on one of the disks was critical information from an expensive survey done about a year ago. The information was still useful, but there had been some turnover in the group, and now they couldn't find it.