Every organisation has one.

The walking encyclopaedia. The unofficial oracle. The person who, when you can’t find something, you just… ask.

Let’s call her Nellie.

Nellie’s been with the company for years. She’s brilliant, helpful, and genuinely wants everyone to succeed. She knows which version of the spreadsheet to trust. She knows who to call about the pool cars. She even knows , somehow , where that legacy document from 2018 ended up on SharePoint after “the reorganisation.”

She is, in many ways, the organisation’s actual information system.

And then Nellie goes on holiday.

Panic. Quiet, British, very polite panic , but panic nonetheless.

People start hovering near her desk out of habit. Then they ping each other on Teams.

“Do you know how to raise a supplier request?”
“Where’s the expenses form?”
“Who used to manage that process , was it Sandra? Or Nigel?”

It’s like someone turned off the Wi-Fi. Technically everything still exists. Nobody can find it.

The thing is, Nellie didn’t hoard information on purpose.

It accumulated around her. Because the system wasn’t good enough, people started asking her. Because people asked her, she developed the knowledge. Because she had the knowledge, people kept asking her. Round and round.

It happens in almost every organisation, particularly in the VCSE sector where staff wear multiple hats, turnover can be high, and “we’ll document that properly later” is a phrase that echoes unanswered down the years.

The result is what I think of as the Ask Nellie System: an entirely human, entirely unreliable, completely invisible information architecture built on goodwill and institutional memory.

It works. Until it doesn’t.

• Nellie goes on holiday
• Nellie goes off sick
• Nellie gets a better offer and hands in her notice
• Nellie retires (and perhaps, secretly, has been planning a Mediterranean cruise for years)

Suddenly, the organisation discovers that a significant chunk of its operational knowledge lives inside one person’s head , and has just walked out the door.

This isn’t just about documents

It’s about trust in the system. Or the lack of it.

When people stop trusting the official information environment , the SharePoint, the shared drive, the intranet, whatever it happens to be , they find workarounds. Nellie is a workaround. So is the shared inbox everyone silently monitors. So are the WhatsApp groups that proliferate when the official channels feel too slow or too unreliable.

I spoke recently with someone whose organisation had this exact problem. We’d started talking about something else entirely, but once I mentioned what 3Clicks does, the conversation took a sharp turn. They’d tried to invest in SharePoint when it was first introduced, but without proper structure it quickly became unusable. So people stopped trusting it. Started hoarding their own files. Created their own systems.

Now the organisation had dozens of parallel information environments, no single version of the truth, and a growing dependence on the three or four people who happened to know how it all worked.

Sound familiar?

The fix isn’t complicated. But it does need to be done properly.

A well-structured information environment means staff don’t need to ask Nellie , because the answer is findable. Three clicks. In plain language. Organised around how people actually look for things, not how the org chart happens to be drawn.

It also means Nellie gets to do her actual job, rather than spending a third of her time being a human search engine.

That’s better for Nellie. Better for the organisation. And considerably better for anyone who was quietly dreading the week she went on holiday.

Take the KIM Scorecard , a five-minute self-assessment to see how your organisation’s information management stacks up.

Or get in touch , I’d love to hear about your Nellie. (Every organisation has one.)

Jon Wellman is the founder of 3Clicks, helping VCSE organisations fix their SharePoint so staff can find what they need , without having to ask.