Afew days ago I was exchanging e-mail with one of my son's teachers to make sure the young prince had completed all of his assignments, when one of my replies bounced. According to the headers, it appeared the BACKSPIN Ventura Unified School District's mail server had suddenly decided to disallow my message because it figured it would require unauthorized relaying.Very strange - e-mail working one minute but not the next. I tried sending a message to my friend Ted Malos who runs the VUSD IT department, and that also bounced, so I called and left a message. Some hours later Malos returned my call and explained what hap-pened.Turns out the school's domain name had expired and -because the e-mail account that had been used when the school registered the name was no longer monitored - the renewal notification had gone unnoticed. He immediately renewed the domain for the next eight years, and by the time he returned my call, everything was back to normal. Now Malos has a new problem: how to ensure that when the registration runs out in eight years, someone will be able to field the renewal request.The chances of Malos being there in eight years are good but not certain, and the same applies to all of his IT staff. This tale is a small-scale example of what is a big hairy issue - the problem of institutional memory Institutional memory concerns the storing and retrieving of information about the organization that is needed for it to function properly over both the short and long term.
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