Companies love to think they can cut costs without consequences, but some lessons come with a hefty price tag.

When senior management decided to wipe out decades of institutional knowledge to save money, they didn’t realize they were digging themselves into a hole they couldn’t get out of.

Read on for the full story!

Delete the Legacy Knowledge department? Okay.

My former employer built its own in-house software, designed to cover all aspects of operations.

From invoicing, tracking stock, creating reports, and semi-automating direct debit billing, it handled virtually everything—spanning a thousand “sub-areas.”

As such, the business ended up with three “IT departments.”

These departments all had distinct responsibilities.

One handled hardware and basic IT issues.

Another, the “medium” IT department, could fix small issues within specific sub-areas of the software.

Finally, the “Legacy” team worked at the deepest level of the software, keeping it functional for over 20 years.

But soon management came in with a big red pen.

In an effort to cut costs, senior management decided the Legacy team was no longer needed, as they were developing a whole new software system and planned to ditch the old one “within a year or so.”

As part of this decision, they also insisted on clearing out the large office the Legacy team occupied.

This included several huge filing cabinets filled with paperwork—dozens of core manuals and hundreds of up-to-date troubleshooting documents, as well as earlier, superseded versions for reference.

Members of the team tried to urge management to reconsider their decision.

The Legacy team sent an email to senior management asking, “Are you sure?”

They eventually received a terse response instructing them to “Destroy all paperwork.”

They were intent on getting rid of everything.

They were also ordered to “Delete all digital files” to free up a substantial amount of space on the shared drive and to wipe their computers back to factory settings.

So the team complied.

So, they did exactly as they were told.

Everything was shredded, erased, and wiped clean.

The team removed every trace of their existence as ordered and left for greener pastures.

But then came an enormous mess.

It has now been three months, and a power outage recently broke something in the rebooted system.

The company can no longer add items into stock, which means invoicing won’t work (since the system reads as “can’t sell what we don’t have”).

In turn, this means there are no invoices for the system to bill.

Now the company was sent back to the dark ages, so to speak.

As a result, they’ve resorted to pen, paper, and shared Excel sheets to keep track of stock, manually typing invoices into a template, and manually checking every payment received against paper invoices.

Needless to say, it put a ton more work on everyone.

The massive workload has led to significant overtime just to keep up with demand.

The company has reached out to the Legacy team for help, but without the manuals they were ordered to destroy, no one is sure how to fix it.

Now management is forced to sit with their own bad decisions.

The new system is still “at least a year out.”

On the bright side, two of the senior managers now have a nice, large office to sit in and contemplate their decisions.

Bet they wish they would have listened to their employees now!

What did Reddit think?

“Are you sure” = “Rethink your decision”.

These managers are about to find out just how short sided they really were.

The consequences of this decision will be even bigger than management thought.

Trying to save money can end up costing a lot money.

The company may have freed up some space and saved a buck, but was it really worth it?

Turns out when you erase your past, you erase your future too.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.