Preface to Second Edition
Much has happened in the decade since I first conceived this book on Corporate memory, yet little has changed. Carlos Cuadra and Judy Wanger introduced me to the term “corporate memory,” when I was working with them to develop one of the first automated records management software packages. Now corporate memory is a widely accepted and widely used term. It is now most often used in the discussion of “knowledge management” – a term that a decade ago did not exist. Ten years ago even the most optimistic of us underestimated the speed at which technology is changing the way we do our work.
A decade later I have returned, hopefully with a better understanding, to the problem of how an organization can capture, organize, retrieve and re-use the information that it creates. In the Knowledge Age that is developing all around us, the essential evidence1 of an organization is a valuable resource that is lost or poorly utilized.
Since I wrote the first edition of this book, we now have new terms and words we can use to understand our situation. But the problem I identified in the first edition of this book – the loss of corporate memory – has not been solved. Indeed, a combination of factors, some technological and some social and political, have converged to make the identification, preservation and re-use of corporate memory even more necessary than before.
I have added discussions of three new topics – one on digital archives and one on Knowledge Applications Services and a discussion of ISO Standard 15489 which gives some order to the field of records management. These topics were not on the table when the first edition appeared. I have also changed the subtitle to reflect the fact that this discussion is within the field of records management and that we are, indeed, leaving the Information Age and entering into the Knowledge Age.
The chapter on digital archives is my attempt to link the discussions in the archival community with those in records management. They are clearly one community, even though there is still little practical collaboration. The struggle between archivists and records managers has, unfortunately, been primarily waged between those who see valuable information from the viewpoint of history (the archivists) and those who focus on the practical, business uses of information (the records managers).
By talking about digital archives, I believe that the fundamental unity of these two
disciplines and crafts can be demonstrated.
The last ten years have given me several opportunities to apply and amplify some of the concepts that I articulated in the first edition of this book. Much of what I have
learned is summed up in the modifications I have made in the original text.
I have also published two additional books that deal with topics related to the concepts dealt with in Corporate Memory.
Document Management, which is a collaborative effort with my dear friend and colleague, Herb Schantz, who introduced me to the fascinating and challenging world of capturing data from thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of forms and other documents. We were able to take the notion of a document as a verb, which I articulated first in this book, and apply it to a very different technological environment. In the context of document management, a document is the answer to a question, not necessarily a physical object. The technologies and techniques used by document managers can be applied, when understood properly, to virtual digital documents.
My most recent book, Thinking for a Living. The Coming Age of Knowledge Work gave me a chance to return to my first discipline, philosophy, and think through the concepts of knowledge and work in light of the startling technological and social developments of the past half century.
I have, where it made sense, included in this edition references to my other books and changed some terminology. I was surprised, for example, that I included no specific discussion of metadata. My omission of the importance of networks and the Internet are more understandable, since they were just becoming part of our work life as I completed the first edition. Now we live in what some call a Network Centric Environment.
Despite the apparent speed of technological change, the basic argument that I put forward in the first edition is still valid – we need to identify and preserve information of value for reuse: corporate memory.