Is there such a thing as too much knowledge?

Where's the corporate memory?  Who knows what the organisation does, why it does it, and what it should do when the next challenge comes up?
 
Of course, the staff know.  But staff move on, and if the information isn't shared, then the information goes with them . . (most graphically shown in my Baseline Report on New Ways of Working where the information was difficult to find because so many people had moved on in the most recent reorganisation that 3000 projects representing 10s of 1000s of staff and £millions in investment was rudderless and reverting back to "the ways we used to do things").
So how can you capture that?
I wouldn't want to be treated by a doctor or nurse who had learnt everything from a book.   Why should I then accept that management will approach each situation anew, with no reference to what went before except what they got out of a book?
Knowledge Sharing
Some things can't be put into electronic pigeonholes, they have to be passed down from person to person.  The role of the knowledge manager is not to catch, kill and pin down the corporate memory, and then to guard it against all comers, but to network, to introduce people to each other, to encourage knowledge sharing where it isn't captured centrally. Does this make everyone a knowledge manager?  It certainly makes every leader one.
So to be efficient, how do you keep and share the knowledge?  If there is so much, how do you decide what's important and must be kept, and what you can afford to lose?
Reasons Why
Richard Barrett (who was knowledge manager at the World Bank) in his books "Liberating the Corporate Soul" and "Building a Values-Driven organisation" illustrates organisations which are held together not by knowledge of facts and figures, but by shared values.  If you know where you're going, then you will all pull in the same direction.
Perhaps this is the answer.  Today's solution to a problem is only marginally relevant to tomorrow's problem.  Today's reason, today's direction, today's values may be entirely pertinent.
Minney.org uses Barrett's principles (one of our associates is a trained Barrett consultant if you want the whole programme) to help the organisation understand where values align, where they don't, and to determine what can be done.
You'll identify the staff who fit and ensure they fit all the better.  You'll lose the staff who don't fit, but in the nicest possible way.  You'll probably get twice as much done with half the staff (well in a service organisation probably +20% with -10%) and develop a much better atmosphere.  And you won't worry about if you've captured every last bit of information, because teams can be trusted to deliver the right outcomes and don't need micromanagement of their outputs