In this article we will take up the concepts put forward by Kenneth A. Megill, a pioneer in knowledge management in companies and author of "The Memory of the Enterprise: Managing Records and Information in Knowledge", with some insights into the current context. Already in his second pakistan b2b leads edition of the book, published in 2005, Megill was very clear about where things were headed: the Internet was growing, companies were adopting it, and paper was quietly heading for the exit door. As a visionary, many of his ideas about the risks and challenges of knowledge management in the business context are still valid today, and we add some interesting twists.
Companies and organisations produce vast amounts of information every day. More than ever before. The levels we have reached in recent years are very difficult to estimate. With the advent of cloud computing and services, plus the boost in social media engagement, a company’s information and data has spread to new corners. Are Twitter accounts corporate information? For Tesla, they surely are. Are the analytics reports from our e-commerce platform corporate information? With all its tabs and reports, yes. Are all these pieces of information and data collected in one place? Not by chance. Most companies most likely have relevant information stored in different systems, in different formats, probably mixing relevant data with irrelevant data. There is no perfect, well-ordered, streamlined, simple database with the central memory of what a large organisation does. But, for our own sake, we should surely try to achieve it.
Businesses and organizations now rely on hundreds of different formats, and of course, some of them may become obsolete over time. Megill once worried about how long CDs (remember those?) would last as a method of data storage. Today, we can worry about streaming and cloud services. With multiple integrated services living in the cloud, a lot of information is collected and managed for us. That’s not a bad thing, it just means we need to make sure we have redundant processes in place to maintain our copies, our versions, or our backups in case those services change. Just like Netflix can remove your favorite movie next month, cloud services can add or remove features, functionality, or capabilities in the blink of an eye. But this idea goes beyond the storage medium. When it comes to software, an organization uses hundreds of different formats (some of them proprietary) to create and store knowledge. Think of database files, Photoshop files, Word and Excel files, video and audio files in different formats, Sketch projects, emails, and so on. The way we store information and data is becoming more complex than ever and also highly dependent on certain brands; think of the dependence that organizations have on PDF, which is a proprietary Adobe format. What we must always keep in mind is that all formats will evolve, that all formats are temporary, and that our company memory must be available and easily accessible throughout the life of the organization – that is, for decades or more than a century.
