Corporate memory has this in common with personal family histories: lives get busy and the process of recording oral history slips down the priority list until salient facts and everyday anecdotes fade away. This is why more than 50% of people surveyed by Ancestry.com and Ipsos don’t know the names of their great-grandparents. It’s why many organisations are sitting on untold volumes of data and documents but are still unable to create a meaningful repository of their own history.
Often, when a significant milestone or anniversary comes around, organisations go into overdrive trying to locate old documents and photos or speak to long-retired lynchpins who hold snippets of institutional memory in their heads. In the process of piecing history back together, stories get distorted and seminal moments are lost.
In some cultures, such as Japan, Germany, the US, and, increasingly, South Africa, company histories are regularly commissioned to commemorate significant anniversaries – usually 25 or 50 years, or for a centenary publication. Since many of these tomes are not shared publicly, it’s hard to know precisely how many companies invest in these written histories, but in Japan it’s estimated to be around 300 publications a year, according to the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources. Certainly, the written histories of family-owned Shinise companies in Japan – businesses that have existed continuously for more than 100 years – is more than just a vanity project. It’s seen as a critical step in understanding the art of achieving longevity.
Digging into the archives
While the preservation of company history is engrained in Japan’s organisational culture, this is not always the case in other parts of the world. As a result, companies often find themselves scrambling when it comes time to look back on their foundational years. Even big-name South African companies such as De Beers (1888), Nedbank (1888), Anglo American (founded in 1917), Barlow Rand (1918), and Sanlam (1918) only began establishing corporate archives just 50 or so years ago.
Maryna Fraser, group archivist at Barlow Rand Limited (Barloworld) from 1973 to 2024, noted in a 1987 address that the Barlow Rand Archives Department was established in 1963 by Rand Mines Limited, in part to support the writing of a 75th anniversary history. Today, the impressive Barlow World Rand Mines archive is housed at Wits Education Library.
By Fraser’s own admission, the process of surveying, arranging, cataloguing, and preserving this information was challenging. Material was often scattered across various sub-archives, or correspondence was held by the company partners. In the case of Barlow Rand Limited, information was not necessarily housed in South Africa, but rather across other archive deposits and research libraries in South Africa or abroad in the likes of the UK and US. Untangling all the threads can be a challenge even to the most seasoned archivist.
Start young, use technology
One solution to this conundrum is to start earlier by building in organisational memory preservation from inception. To help achieve this, the current buzz in archival circles is how best to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and digital preservation tools. This approach has been embraced in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the country’s chief archivist Dr. Hamad Al Mutairi is overseeing a process of supporting and enhancing record-keeping through the incorporation of AI.
During a recent conversation with the International Council on Archives, Al Mutairi explained that as far back as 1999 the UAE began thinking of ways to automate and digitalise state record keeping, including the incorporation of AI. In line with the UAE’s nationwide push, the country’s National Archives began looking for ways to use AI and machine learning in the context of traditional archive management. This required Al Mutairi to consider how AI tools could assist with the acquisition of documents, their immediate processing, preservation and, ultimately, availability. The AI tools that Al Mutairi believed could play an important role included automating document gathering, processing huge volumes of data, cataloguing information, automating indexing, and looking for linkages between documents.
In the future, AI is expected to play an even more crucial role by helping to reverse the effects of “memory fade” – the insidious erosion of internal knowledge and know-how over time.
There is already a range of AI tools available to help organisations automatically preserve internal knowledge and corporate memories, improve collaboration, compile meeting or conference summaries in real-time, and store these insights for easy reference in the future. Large language models (LLMs) and advanced AI can also draw out themes, action items, and key points that can be tracked over the lifetime of the organisation. Adding natural language processing into the mix helps transform emails, presentations, and notes into structured insights.
According to AI transformation strategist and lecturer Prof. Francesco Iarlori, speaking at the 2nd Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence in 2024, deploying advanced AI and machine learning memory systems should ultimately help companies “safeguard their intellectual capital, culture, and history”. This will also improve tasks like onboarding new employees, transferring knowledge across generations, accessing information, and streamlining how documents and reports are compiled and reviewed. Used smartly, decision-making should be enhanced, continuity improved, productivity boosted, reliance on specific individuals and teams reduced, and – for bigger companies – a sense of consistency and unity embedded across the organisation.
Instead of sitting in a dusty basement, knowledge accessibility will rise by around 50%, says Iarlori. Similarly, operational costs should drop by some 30% and retrieval times could be roughly 90% faster using AI than current systems – boosting organisational efficiency in the process.
Of course, as Iarlori notes, using AI-powered knowledge management systems does come at a cost: both financially and in terms of planetary sustainability, given AI’s draw on power and water resources. There are other concerns too, including data privacy and the ethics of data gathering. However, the lure of automating around 40-50% of knowledge management processes is strong, particularly in the space of data categorisation, indexing, and retrieval.
Then, of course, there’s the question of human involvement. Ideally, AI-powered organisational memory would not replace humans but rather free them up to focus on higher-value tasks, believes Iarlori. It is human history after all, with all its twists and turns and innovative “off-script” moments.
Could an AI vault trump human memories?
Having just overseen the completion of GIBS’s 25th anniversary book, the debate around using technology to enhance – or sidestep – human involvement in recording and preserving organisational memory is front of mind for Howard Fox, GIBS’s managing executive for commercial.
As Emeritus Professor Kerrin Myres notes in the foreword to GIBS: 25 Years & Beyond, the human-led process this book followed was not all plain sailing. “Over the course of the past 25 years, intermittent efforts were made to start recording the unfolding history of our unique business school. In the past, some of these efforts were haphazard, taking second place to the business of building an entrepreneurial business school with a strong independent streak,” she wrote.
Ultimately, GIBS benefited from recognising early on how critical it was to share insights from its dynamic history, as well as the stories of those who founded the business school. To this end, access to GIBS’s well-preserved library and the Acumen digital archive was crucial, particularly the series of in-depth interviews and articles produced by the Acumen team for GIBS’s 20th anniversary in 2020.
As Fox explains, “For our 20th anniversary celebration, we started the process of speaking to members of our founding team, including Founding Dean Nick Binedell, Karl Hofmeyr, Beulah Muller, and Sue Swart. Those interviews were gold.”
This process was replicated for the 25th anniversary book, including insights from former Dean Prof. Nicola Kleyn and current Dean Prof. Morris Mthombeni. “We also spoke to the likes of Sharon Clarke, Vivienne Spooner, Bonita Lee-Shaw, Yogavelli Nambiar, Michael Goldman, Laura Malan, Albert Wöcke and Mike Stonier,” says Fox. “Again, a wealth of anecdotes flowed from these chats.”
Considering how AI might have played a role in supporting the process, Fox believes that “AI might be able to capture the facts, but I think it would take a lot to replicate these human voices”.
That said, he believes that capturing organisational knowledge, from photographs to records and increasingly video, audio and social media content, “is definitely something that could be handled by large language models or AI systems in the future”.
Fox does, however, question whether new companies would have the appetite for deploying record management systems from the start. “I guess the question is whether start-ups have the time or the resources to invest in organisational memory technologies from inception,” he says. “With so many businesses failing to get past the five-year mark, my guess is it won’t be a priority until about a decade into the journey.” By which time, some historical gems might already be lost.
A case in point is the famous white plastic architect’s model of the GIBS campus, which Nick Binedell and Karl Hofmeyr dragged around Johannesburg as they pitched the new MBA and a business school campus that was still under construction. During a 2019 interview, GIBS’s first marketing head, Sue Swart, referred to the disappearance of this special GIBS artefact as “the mystery of the architect’s model”. While the physical model remains AWOL, the presence of this anecdote in GIBS’s recorded history is both charming and relatable, adding to the humanity and humour of a business school built for people, by people, and boasting all the quirks that entails.
Getting started
When it comes to incorporating AI and digital technology tools into the process of preserving organisational memory, Dr. Hamad Al Mutairi, director of the Archives Department at the National Archives of the UAE, offers these tips:
- Engage with human archivists to steadily mature the AI in line with your needs.
- Start by immersing yourself in the available – and emerging – technologies and systems.
- Pay attention to the behaviour of various AI utilities.
- Consider your ultimate goal, and the potential scalability of the chosen system.
- Be budget savvy. Investigate both big vendors and ready-made solutions, as well as open-source options that can be tailored to suit specific needs.
- Play with the system: see how you can appraise documents and experiment with automated or supervised rules.
- Don’t forget to preserve digital, audiovisual, and social media archives.
- Consider digital storage options, from storage devices to cloud-based solutions.
- Pay attention to issues of sustainability and net-zero impacts.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Capturing organisational memories, data, documents, and culture in real time can help keep insights alive, wisdom in play, and corporate knowledge alive.
- Young businesses may not see the value in preserving history as they power forward, but as key milestones come up accessing this information becomes a priority.
- Incorporating new technologies such as AI can help guard against memory fade by sourcing, cataloguing, and indexing information.
