We do not know Van Gogh only through his paintings. A huge part of what we understand about him as a person, about his method, his fears, his thoughts on colour and light, comes from his letters to his brother Theo. Hundreds of letters that Theo kept carefully and that his widow later collected and published. The paintings show the result, the letters show the thinking. Without them Van Gogh would have remained a mysterious author of bright canvases. With them he is a living conversation partner you can still argue with more than a century later. I often think about this when I sit down to write articles here on business.ingello.com. An information resource is not a marketing channel. It is a way to preserve yourself in time.
Memory that does not fit in a head
Every company has a memory. Only in most companies it is stored in the least reliable place imaginable: in employees' heads and in messenger chats. How to handle that one difficult client, why we dropped that supplier, where the password for the old server is, which mistakes we have already made and will not repeat. While the people are in place, everything works. Then a key employee leaves, and a piece of the company leaves with them. Not metaphorically but literally: the process they ran gets reinvented from scratch, stepping on the same rakes they once learned to avoid.
I have seen this dozens of times. A client calls: the person who "knew everything about the warehouse" has left, and now nobody understands why the numbers in the report do not add up. We start digging like archaeologists, rebuilding from scraps of chat history and spreadsheets the logic that lived in one head for years. It is expensive, slow and, to be honest, a little sad. Because all of it could simply have been written down.
Knowledge that is not written down belongs not to the company but to a person. And it leaves with them on holiday, on sick leave and to the competitor.
The Library of Alexandria in a single copy
History knows many cases of civilisations losing what they had accumulated. The Library of Alexandria did not burn down in a single day, as the popular story goes. Most likely it faded over centuries: funding shrank, scholars moved away, nobody recopied the scrolls. Knowledge that exists in a single copy and that nobody updates dies quietly. Corporate knowledge bases die in exactly the same way. They are created with enthusiasm, filled for a month, and then nobody looks at them, and a year later they hold instructions for systems that no longer exist.
Hence the first practical conclusion: an information resource lives only as long as people read it and write in it. It is not an archive, it is a garden. It needs watering.
External memory that works for you
There is a second side to an information resource, the one facing outwards. Every article on a company blog, every honest case breakdown, every explanation of how you think about your work becomes a brick in the foundation of your reputation. That brick works around the clock for years. Someone who finds your article in search three years from now will get to know you while you are sleeping, resting or busy with a completely different project. An advert lives as long as you keep paying for it. An article lives as long as the internet exists.
I have noticed an amusing thing: clients who come to us through articles behave differently from those who come through advertising. They already know how we think. They have read that I am against mindlessly copying competitors and in favour of fast prototypes, and they came for exactly that. Half of the conversation that usually goes into getting to know each other has already happened without me. The article talked to the person before I did.
More than business
Ingello has a mission that sounds unexpected for an IT company: automation, radical longevity, technical immortality, a scientific path to revival and free, endless creativity. I will not retell it in full here, it lives on ingello.com. But the information resource holds a special place in that chain. Everything we know about the people of the past we know from what they left behind: texts, letters, drawings, records of decisions. A person who writes down their thoughts leaves behind not only the results of their work but a model of their thinking. The better that model is described, the more of the person remains in the world.
The same applies to companies. A company that has formalised its experience can outlive its founders, pass knowledge on to new teams and even become the foundation for other companies. That is exactly why business.ingello.com exists: a public library where experience turns into articles, so that small independent teams can work autonomously and well without reinventing what someone has already figured out.
How to start without heroics
The most common mistake is trying to write a perfect knowledge base about everything right away. It is like deciding on Monday to take up running and signing up for a marathon the same day. A different approach works, slow and boring.
- Once a week, write down one decision: what you chose, from which options and why. This is the most valuable knowledge, and it is the first to vanish.
- Every time you explain something to a new employee for the second time, write it down. There will not be a third time.
- Once a month, turn one internal note into a public article. Remove the secrets, keep the thought.
- Appoint an owner for the resource. A garden without a gardener turns into a wasteland.
What to do tomorrow: pick one process that currently rests on a single person and ask them to spend half an hour dictating how they do it and why. Write it down. That will be the first page of your external memory, and a few years from now it may well save you a week of digging.
