Servers get replaced, or as Cisco calls it "refreshed" every 3-5 yrs. IT provisions a server, either bare metal or virtual, and hands it off the the team that requested it. That team will setup third-party or in-house developed applications and setup automation to make things work. Depending on the team, it may be documented anywhere from haphazardly to very detailed. Then time goes by.
The people who setup the server are LR'd or fed up and leave. The documentation, however much is written, may or may not be migrated to the next, new documentation system: Jive, IWE, wiki, confluence, IBM communities, sharepoint, etc. depending on whether or not the team that's left knows where this documentation is, how important it is, etc. In many cases, it just gets lost.
Now it's time to refresh the server and IT builds a new one, and the app team installs the necessary apps, but quickly realize that the automation/jobs that ran in the background and haven't been touched in months or years need to be updated to point to the new server or be setup to run on the new server.
I recall being a contractor on a team and setting up some automation as well as being responsible for refreshing an existing server. After a budget cut, several contractors on that team along with myself had our SOWs cut short. I had an opportunity to join Cisco as an employee a year later and came back. While working on a new team, a contractor from my old team who was apparently a replacement for me contacted me to ask about some automation I'd written and wanted to know how it worked, where it was running from, and how to update it. I told him he'd have to have his manager work with my manager to determine if my team had the resources to pull me off my current work to help them when I'd left perfectly good documentation behind when I left. A couple of quarters later, IT contacted me as the POC for a server from the old team saying it was due for a refresh and asking me if it was still in use or necessary. I had to tell them who the managing manager was, and for them to go ask him as I was no longer on that team & had no idea if it was in use any longer. Apparently it was, and it got refreshed as I got paged in the middle of the night asking for assistance in getting something on it working that was working on the old system. It was fun waking up that manager (same one who'd let me go) in the middle of the night to tell him to wake up his support team to figure out how to fix that server I didn't have access to, hadn't supported in 2-3 yrs, and no long had access to the documentation what was written with regards to that host. Given that the old team enjoyed playing the "our stuff is super secret-you can't have access" game, I had no qualms over saying I couldn't support them.
Gotta love Karma. Yeah, loss of corporate history or organizational memory, or whatever you want to call it is a real thing and it bites Cisco in the a$$ every year.