Shiller & Company

An “information hoarder” refers to a person who possesses and guards in-depth knowledge about how an organization’s business and systems function. For information hoarders, knowledge is power, and they are reluctant to share it with others.

When systems have business and data quality management rules embedded in code or contentful data structures, information hoarders have a ripe breeding ground.

It’s not hard to find information hoarders like Bob below because they share these attributes:

1. Bob is the go-to person when anyone has a question. When a popular refrain is, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Bob,” you’ve identified an Information Hoarder, which is Bob, not the person giving an actual answer.
2. Bob doesn’t give complete answers to questions. People need to come back several times to fill in the blanks.
3. Bob intimidates those with less knowledge, which keeps most people from engaging.

Management wonders what they’ll do without Bob. Bob upsets many people but he has unique institutional knowledge. Bob is real. Unfortunately, Bob, who is just as likely to be a woman, works at nearly every company, including yours, and has (and uses) the power to destroy in the interest of self-preservation:

• A large insurance company’s multi-year migration project failed because a couple of key players with unique institutional knowledge about legacy systems formed an information wall and refused to share what they knew. Management was too fearful of their knowledge power to fire them.
• A global logistics company was unable to build a data model of the current state because a business expert, who had been there from the department’s inception, held the metaphorical keys to the business operations and refused to contribute. Management overvalued her institutional knowledge, kept her on staff, and the business became sclerotic.

A good solution that looks beyond whether Bob deserves a job is to engineer systems in which information hoarders have no power and hero dependency no longer exists because the system’s work is transparent and self-documenting.