The Corporate Memory concept

Organisations are flooded with information of all kinds, generated electronically and otherwise. Increased use of computers and networks, and access to global networks compound the problem, while inadequate management results in an ever‐increasing loss of time and information. Experts claim that each manager wastes an average of four weeks per year just in searching for documents, which translates to a conservative cost of R25 000 per executive per year. It is even estimated that 7.5% of documents are lost forever. So the information professional is faced with an increasingly important challenge, namely to manage this diverse and rapidly growing collection effectively. Several approaches have been suggested to manage the intellectual assets in an organisation: for example, using shared file servers to store the online objects, or storing copies of documents in image format, or using PC‐based file‐finding software. These approaches have advantages and shortcomings. We propose an integrated solution which we call the Corporate Memory to maintain all active and historical information that is worth sharing, managing and preserving, which may even include information that is usually intangible, such as the ideas and experience of staff. Our approach involves handling each Corporate Memory object, be it physical or electronic, in the way most suited to the type of object. We propose the use of specialised tools, such as MS Word, which already exist throughout an organisation for data capture and object storage. These tools should be linked to a central hub of information, responsible for indexing and managing the objects, which allows for a high level of control as well as offering a single point of access to the objects. To be effective, the system must handle diverse data, cope with ever‐changing requirements and answer unpredictable requests. Managing the Corporate Memory is essentially an information task and not a computing task. It is not only logical but also critical that this should be left in the hands of information experts.