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Sounds like those people are holders of institutional memory. The bigger companies get, the more they forget about the value of institutional memory - treating everybody like a cog in a wheel. Individual managers know the value of such people, but company policy doesn't recognize them because they aren't beans that can be easily counted.

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> institutional memory.

Yes, exactly. Thank you for this phrase. There's also a certain amount of institutional bonding (to coin another phrase) involved with these people, in that they're sort of "mother hens" who take care of everyone.

Definitely not cogs, but I'm not sure anyone is who actually belongs in a particular office. Cogs are (generally) apathetic, at least in their machine counterpart. In a team scenario, "apathetic" usually translates to some kind of burden being shifted to the group.

This sort of knowledge is so so handy. When some bright spark shortcuts the normal process the havoc that occurs is baffling to everyone except the old hand who cares and understands. Just being around and observing events can make an employee pretty damn useful quite fast. I'm not sure if every business has as many moving parts as the one I'm in, but it can't be unusual. With dozens of bits of software that supposedly work together, the bugs are sometimes fascinating. Kodak, I'm looking at you. Why do you refuse to archive any information on patients who's first name starts with BRE?!

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