Where are all the corporate archives?

 Using a company's history

There’s an article reprinted in the December 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review on benefits of using a company’s own history as a leadership tool which is an interesting read.

It argues that a company’s history has a real value in informing the present and future. These include helping to underpin group values and beliefs, in knowing the past in order to better formulate workable plans for the future, as a way of phrasing change has been successfully achieved before, etc etc. Things well beyond key dates and celebrations.

It gives seven tips for getting history on your side which are about maintaining corporate archives as a function to mine for it, and about what can be expected to resonate most within and outwith a company both to be valued from them.

There’s some classic KM and / or risk management, some are things associated with archives or information services if they’re also keeper of said, some are more usual as marketing function.

Corporate Archives

Musing on this all it occurs to me that a lot of corporate archives are very much historical in use– never used for anything current or real-time, more for selecting from at or near anniversary’s or when particularly long-standing members of staff retire when the hunt goes up for the ‘year one’ photo.

Also, the ‘archives’ of lots of companies are more implicit than explicit, you could say in classic KM-speak they’re more within the heads of some of the staff than they are recorded in written or photographic form. Even if they are it tends to be patchy.

Corporate archives is not something that cries out ‘Resource Me Urgently / Spend Time Here’.  Often it’s the dusty boxes or the files in the corner. Often they’re patchy and quite what collection management policy existed to construct the collection that does exist would be anyone’s guess, there is often no ‘formal’ designated keeper or policy re, no central place for. Because their relevance is under-valued for present business because there is often no one in the upper echelons seeking to link past with present and future using them as an aid.

Linking business future to archival knowledge

Which brings me to another couple of sentences from the article.

“For a leader then, the challenge is to find in an organization’s history its usable past.”

Now that’s intriguing for all kinds of reasons. Sifting, selecting with care, sieving through for the bit that speaks to now / the agenda under consideration. What is there in the past that can articulate the vision for this specific future being undertaken. How does it help make the argument.

“The reality is that we are all historians when it comes to making decisions.”

As to that line… well it’s true to an extent, we all base decisions on prior learning, knowledge, experience. Most of us build up some form of overall surrounding context that grounds us and helps us. But perhaps the short-term is appreciated more than the longer-term in timescales of what is deemed relevant, which is often about how current the information is perceived to be.

Lost and inaccessible knowledge

Corporate archives tend to get very short shift, even if they do in fact exist. Try getting ahold of any document in a hurry that is published by an organisation that no longer exists and it soon becomes very apparent how few merged institutions keep anything deemed superseded, old, out-of-date, and how inaccessible it can be and dependent on someone’s memory who was there before. That’s even more so when it comes to internal information. What happens to the archives of all those places that simply go out of existence?  Are they given to some other archive or institution? A few are. Is there anywhere that would be relevant? Not always. Very often for lots of practical factors they reside in the bin instead as people are in a hurry, don’t have room, time, don’t realise that superseded doesn’t mean irrelevant or useless. Even if donated, can that place then afford to keep them, to make them accessible and promote them? If kept in-house will anyone not within the company ever know they exist? There are endless issues with corporate archives.

Finding a present tense value in Corporate Archives

So it’s nice to read something arguing for the use and relevance of corporate history in general beyond the historical context.  Properly maintained corporate archives have a place within that I would argue.  And that would only realistically happen if the corporate archives were seen to have an internal present and future business use beyond internal event celebration season and any wider research and access agenda.