Organisational memories

Procurement can start good relationships but engagement needs to be continually worked at. In one of my case studies, the initial procurement was set up years earlier, but by 2007 people were not working together. The replacement senior management had to overcome adversarial tensions in order to create new relationships. Those tensions had been so strong that participants still remembered them over a year later. Bad memories take time to overcome {*}, and engagement takes time and has to be worked at continually.

*Citing whom? Do organisations have memories and do they matter? In central government, civil service senior managers move frequently so don't they lose organisational memory? Probably. Few remember the IT debacles of the 1980s, like Camelot. See Tony Collin's Computer Weekly Blog.