Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [36]
You never know what will be helpful. Before I really got religion on the “more is better” gospel, I tried to talk Vicki out of scanning all my old high school yearbooks. “How could that be of any use?” I asked. Fortunately she ignored my protests, and lo and behold a few years later I received an e-mail from a Dr. Tom Hill, a successful entrepreneur turned corporate team-building consultant, asking me for some biographical information so that he could describe my work in Tom Hill’s Friday Eaglezine. He identified himself as being a 1953 graduate from the same high school that I had graduated from in 1952, but his name didn’t ring any bells for me. A search for “Tom Hill” in the yearbooks pulled back photos and descriptions of various activities that brought the high school memories flooding back. When we spoke, I was able to recall half-forgotten events and people we’d clearly known in common, which made for a pleasant conversation. I’m now part of his Eagle network.
The “who the hell” problem only gets worse with a person’s age. With the advent of social networking sites such as LinkedIn, “remember me?” messages and invitations to join yet another group are constantly pouring in. By hanging on to three decades’ worth of e-mails, business cards, meeting appointments, photos, and audio recordings and using MyLifeBits to group and interlink them, my contact management has reached a whole new level.
What you may scorn today may one day turn out to be practically useful. A key reason people leave established companies to form start-ups is to get away from the numerous and stultifying rules and procedures. Ironically, one of the first things they miss is some of that important red tape. In 1988 I was head of engineering at a start-up, and we realized we needed a product release process. Thankfully, we saved a lot of time when an employee turned up a copy of the release process document from Sun Microsystems. It was equivalent to a process we had used at DEC, so it didn’t take much work to turn it into something I was happy with. I continue to receive requests from others in the same boat for items like DEC’s engineering handbooks.
As work experience becomes more of a scientific record and less of a befuddled bio-memory, your work time will become more creative. First, you simply won’t have to argue about what happened anymore, and second, the interconnectivity of e-memory records will free you to make new associations.
THE E-MEMORY ENTERPRISE
At the same time Total Recall is changing your work experience, it will be changing it for everyone else. Certain organizations will make better use of it than others. Many of them will make office e-memories available to everyone who has a similar job within the company or institution. It’s safe to predict that the same trends in technology that will lead individuals to use e-memories will also lead organizations to make the most of the new technology. Many will soon be keeping everything from internal meetings, e-mails, and memos to external-facing activities like sales, customer support, and purchasing. And making it searchable, usable information.
Time management, knowledge mining, trend discovery, context-sensitive reminding, and other computer assistance will also be applied to the institution’s broader memory. SRI, the institute where Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964, is managing an extensive DARPA-funded research program called the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO). CALO presumes a corporate digital memory, and rather than requiring users to learn all of its ins and outs, it learns from its users and from the material their organization produces. It learns about people’s needs, routines, and expectations to become a real assistant that can be proactive. Software companies such as DEVON are already pursuing directions like this with products like DEVONthink, which aims to detect complex and subtle connections between documents