Enterprise 2.0 is about, among other things, transparency, and providing accessible archives of key business interactions. As the McKinsey report, The next revolution in interactions, offered, it is within these interactions that much of the enterprise value is located. With Enterprise 2.0 we want to unlock this value for broader use. But how far can we go with this transparent archiving?

A recent New Yorker article, Remember This?, (May 28.2007) provides a look into where we might be going. Gordon Bell, formerly of DEC and now with Microsoft is exploring the archive genre in depth. Bell is a super smart guy who was the first person from Kirksville, Missouri to go to MIT. He also played a key role in the early days of DEC, the formation of the Internet, and a few other things before ending up doing exploratory research at Microsoft.

Once Gordon learned of the possibilities of scanning documents, he decided to go paperless with his life records. This did not stop with documents but went on to phone calls, IMs., and anything that happen on his computer. And now his archiving includes his in person conversations, and, with the help of a camera around his neck, anything he sees.

His second insight was that storage would be available by 2007 for just about whatever a person wanted to save (and it has). His third epiphany was that by adding contemporary material to his archive he was building a “personal-transaction processing system.” What he meant he was recoding everything he did. It is more a transaction storage system.

But how do you go back and find all the stuff? A colleague at Microsoft, Eric Horvitz is working on a Lifebrowser that uses time as a means of locating information. It learns your preferences through your requests and becomes smarter.

So now we may have no boundaries on our enterprise archive capabilities. The use of blogs and wikis to record the interactions of project teams or field repair teams, for example, for further use has been seen as an improvement over the silos of email and attachments. These may seem primitive first steps into the world that Gordon Bell envisions.

The New Yorker article concludes with some speculations on the consequences of this boundless archiving. We are selective and revisionist in our memory. What will happen if it is possible to fact check everything? What will be the characteristic of the new Enterprise 20.0 when the limits to archiving are gone?

The article concludes with a quote from Bell, “Your aspirations go up with every new tool. You’ve got all this content there and you want to use it, but there’s always this problem of wanting more.”

And more and more…