Корпоративная память и обратная контрабанда

Some of the methods and notation are familiar, but others are long obsolete. Even where nothing has officially changed, cultural assumptions about what should be documented explicitly or can be assumed have changed, making interpretation difficult. And it would really be nice to have a big-picture overview book. At the end of the project someone should’ve been commissioned to write a book, “What This Goddamn Plant Is: And, How It Works”. That book is effectively being written now, only by archaeologists.

Reverse corporate espionage

A former colleague and I were contacted some time after this by another former colleague who now had some sort of management role in this group. Would we be amenable to consulting part time on a project relating to the old Plantname? I agreed. It sounded interesting, and I was being offered an hourly rate amounting to several times my previous salary.

Thus I landed the strange job of trying to explain to the company how its plant worked.

I could draw on several kinds of personal memory for this job. I remembered how some things worked, and the 30-year-ancient engineering practices were my own. More importantly, I had an idea of what was important and how the pieces fit together.

Perhaps equally importantly, I unofficially had some documentation. During our office moves and reorganizations, the document situation became increasingly dire. I would wait days to get something mailed to me, after tracking down a series of merged document libraries, some of which were halfway through the digitization processes. Paranoid corporate management also had rules about anything relating to trade secrets, which meant anything relating to the polymer process at all, which made it hard to work while visiting contractors’ offices.

So, we developed a don’t-ask/don’t-tell policy of making private copies of documents and carrying them around with us. Engineers, to generalize, hate waiting around for stupid reasons, and having documents meant that we could get to work. It also made us look better, since we got things done on time, instead of having to send out lame excuses that we’re late because we’re waiting on a fax.

My job now was to smuggle these documents back into the company. I would be happy to just hand them over. But that doesn’t make any sense to the company. The company officially has these documents (digitally managed!), and officially I don’t. In reality, the situation is the reverse, but who wants to hear that? God knows what official process would let me fix that.

No, the documents need to be brought back in to where they ‘already were’ unofficially. Physical copies are made and added to the local group library. Eventually they’ll probably work their way into the digital document management system, the next time someone canvasses and notices some documents with no inventory control tags. I hope they aren’t lost this time, because I won’t be around in another 30 years to smuggle them back in again.

Oh, and as an external consultant, I’m not allowed to know some of the trade secrets in the documents. The internal side of the team needs to handle the sensitive process information, and be careful about how that information crosses boundaries when talking to the external consultants. Unfortunately, the internal team doesn’t know what the secrets are, while I do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name on some related patents. Nonetheless, I need to smuggle these trade secrets back into the company, so that the internal side can handle them. They just have to make sure they don’t accidentally repeat them back to me.

We hear a lot about the spy-movie kind of corporate espionage. I’d love to read a study of reverse corporate espionage, where companies forget their own secrets and employees have to unofficially get them back. I’m convinced it happens more than you’d think.

A solvable problem?

I’m not sure what the moral to this story is.

Better organization and document management could solve some of the problems. But attempts to fix corporate document management also caused some of them, so one has to be careful. We might’ve had better luck if more of the physical office libraries still existed. We only retained some of the documents because one of them did.

Memory of techniques and importance is even harder. Maintaining a continuous gradient of ages in the company probably helps, so you don’t fall off a memory cliff when one cohort of employees retires.

But maybe engineering archaeology will always exist. The more I look around, the more the engineering world, once you go back more than a few years, looks like subterranean New York City. A mass of strange engineering feats humming away out of sight, produced by long-forgotten ancient peoples, leaving only fragmentary maps and diagrams.

—An engineer, 2011-12-04