This issue is about human mRNA: the people who seek out connections that should exist but don’t, and who translate and move information around silo-ed organisations and ecosystems to make those connections happen.
> Knowledge management systems and other technology-first solutions for increasing this kind of internal connectivity are always well-intended. But they invariably fail at the translation part of the job because good translation is fundamentally about meaning-making
I perform some part of this for a singapore country unit of a F50 company
The SG entity hires me as vendor
But they don’t pay me for that. Officially I’m just there to write code and build systems.
But I wouldn’t have built anything usable if i didn’t play some aspect of meaning making across different contexts
The next phase of improvement I’m looking at is to build a data dictionary so that some of the unnecessary (in my opinion) inconsistency in terms can be removed
As someone whose value in corporate settings has always mostly been as Human mRNA, I've had a couple of bosses who understood/valued it and others who didn't. What's frustrating is that every so many years someone writes about this and nothing changes - thus even when teams have someone like this, they are so often lost in a re-org because they aren't seen/valued.
> Knowledge management systems and other technology-first solutions for increasing this kind of internal connectivity are always well-intended. But they invariably fail at the translation part of the job because good translation is fundamentally about meaning-making
I perform some part of this for a singapore country unit of a F50 company
The SG entity hires me as vendor
But they don’t pay me for that. Officially I’m just there to write code and build systems.
But I wouldn’t have built anything usable if i didn’t play some aspect of meaning making across different contexts
The next phase of improvement I’m looking at is to build a data dictionary so that some of the unnecessary (in my opinion) inconsistency in terms can be removed
a lot of value comes from doing things which are important but can't really be written down and formalised — like meaningmaking
I would kill to work for people who understand this
As someone whose value in corporate settings has always mostly been as Human mRNA, I've had a couple of bosses who understood/valued it and others who didn't. What's frustrating is that every so many years someone writes about this and nothing changes - thus even when teams have someone like this, they are so often lost in a re-org because they aren't seen/valued.
yes — my 2c is that a good first step is to make human mRNA work part of a person's role
explicitly i mean, instead of something valuable that they do on the side and in spite of how their role is formally defined