The proliferation of digital data is a sure sign that we are getting
deeper and deeper into the knowledge economy. But have we made any
effort to ensure that this information will be available 200 years
from now, or better yet in 20 years. As more and more enterprise
content exists solely in the digital domain, enterprise knowledge
managers are starting to face this paradox in their daily lives.

(This issue, by the way, is not limited to documents in the
traditional sense; my 2001 book on the history of photography
included a sidebar entitled "The Compatibility Conundrum" noting
that "Daguerreotypes taken in
1839 survive today; many photographs taken with early still-video or
digital cameras do not…" Some of NASA's earliest photographs of the
planet earth are no longer accessible. Even the original moonwalk
video footage from Apollo 11 not only can't be found, but would be
unplayable by present day equipment if it were.)

Certainly someone, somewhere must be doing something about this,
you, dear reader, must be wondering. Slowly, but surely, someone is.

The Library of Congress launched its Digital Preservation program in
1998 to assess the current state of digital archiving and
preservation. In 2000, the United States Congress appropriated ca.
$100 million for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program (NDIIPP), a collaborative effort led by the
Library of Congress, whose mission is to "make its resources
available and useful… and preserve a universal collection of
knowledge and creativity for future generations."
The Library will make its final report to Congress under the program
in 2010.

But enterprises shouldn't – and can't – wait that long. Every
industry faces the compatibility conundrum. One way of addressing
the problem, while NDIIPP is figuring out the long-term solution, is
to ensure that information is preserved in a format as generic as
possible and that knowledge retention audits are routinely performed
to ensure that
information is not lost. Up to this point, I've focused on explicit
knowledge. Tacit knowledge, which is said to comprise ca. 80% of a
company's knowledge is, of course, not recorded, yet somehow we need
to tap into it. That makes it as volatile if not more so than
explicit knowledge.
People move frequently from job to job, both within an organization
and to new companies. Products can span decades and have lifecycles
that outlast several generations of employees. The NASA space
shuttle, perhaps one of the most complex engineering projects in
modern times, started in 1981 and is scheduled to continue at least
through 2009. Engineering drawings of earlier space boosters are
gone. Any attempt to bring back such equipment for alternate space
exploration purposes means literally re-inventing the wheel.

Retaining knowledge isn't always at the forefront of a manager's
list of priorities; it has little short-term payback and can be
expensive, labor-intensive, and there is no guarantee that a company
won't experience a loss of information over time.
For now, there is only one sure answer for critical knowledge, and
it's almost antithetical to how we work: maintain this information
in analog form. While we sort all this out, at least we'll know
that knowledge workers of the future will not have to depend on
digital system upgrades (or retrogrades) and transitions that took
place in the intervening years since the information was created, as
the ability to view and retrieve such information will always
available.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex. He can be
reached at jspira@...