Корпоративная память и обратная контрабанда

I worked for several decades at a large petrochemical company. In the early 1980s, we designed and built a plant that refines some hydrocarbon type stuff into other hydrocarbon type stuff. Over the next thirty years, institutional memory of this plant faded to a dim recollection. Oh, it still operates, and still makes money for the firm. Day to day maintenance is performed, and the skilled local crew is familiar with the controls, valves, safety systems, and other such.

But the company has forgotten how it really works.

A few things conspired to make this happen:

• The downturn in the oil industry through the 1980s and 1990s caused a moratorium on new hires. By the late 1990s, our group was a mix of people over 55 and under 35, with few in between.

• We gradually made the move to fully computer-based design.

• A series of group reorganizations physically moved our office several times.

• A major corporate merger several years after that completely dissolved us into a larger petrochemical firm, causing a significant institutional and personnel shakeup.

Institutional archaeology

In the early 2000s, several of my colleagues and I retired.

In the late 2000s, the company remembered that this plant existed, and thought about doing something with it. Specifically, increase output by debottlenecking one unit, and doing a feasibility study on addition of a second unit.

Now they had a problem. How was it built? Why was it built like that? How does it work?

Institutional memory grows hazy at this point. The alien machinery hums along, producing polymers. The company knows how to service it, but isn’t quite sure what arcane magic was employed in its construction. In fact nobody is even sure how to start investigating.

It falls to some of the then-younger engineers, now the senior cohort, to dig up documentation. This is less like institutional memory and more like institutional archaeology. Nobody has any idea what documentation exists on this plant, if any, and if it exists, where it is, or what form it might take. It was designed by a group that no longer exists, in a company that has since merged, in an office that has been closed, using non-digital methods that are no longer employed.

The first step is finding out what the plant’s name is. It turns out that the name most engineers use is just a colloquial name based on its location, and it has another official name. Several of them, even. There is the name of the internal project that designed it, and the name of the joint venture under which it was actually built.

There was a unique ID assigned in 1998 as part of a document-management revamp. There is another unique ID, assigned in 2001 for digitization purposes. It’s not entirely clear which document management systems are current, incidentally. Also, some of them point to other document-management systems.

No luck here. The 1998 ID points to documents located in a “library” at an address that hasn’t existed since long before 1998, which might explain why that 2001 ID doesn’t point to any digitized documents older than some recent reports on routine maintenance. At the time, I had naively hoped digitization would solve our problems forever. My manager was reading a dense book about it that I picked up out of curiosity. It had seemed persuasive.

But, the old-fashioned phone and email tree worked a bit better. The old research division is still mostly intact, and their physical library exists. Someone there is able to find documentation on the plant’s polymer processes, as well as copies of some engineering documents duplicated for the R&D library’s local records. Big paper blueprints and engineering drawings, as well as books of data, in dusty filing cabinets. The paper documents tauntingly sport IDs announcing that they had been digitized by Big Digitization Corp at some point in the past. Who knows what happened to that archive.

Deciphering documentation

Some documents assembled, the engineers get to work trying to get a handle on how to organize a debottlenecking project. Unfortunately, the documents seem to be written partially in hieroglyphics, and are only partly complete. They make some very slow progress. The manager half-jokes that engineering schools should teach a course in engineering archaeology, where students are given a pile of 30-year old documents and asked to figure out what’s going on. I like the idea. Maybe even read an old engineering textbook, like the collectors into repairing old vacuum-tube electronics do.