It could be said that the value and success of a company is measured by the amount of knowledge it has. Gone are the days when companies can be mostly brain dead and still be successful pumping out low-tech widgets (although some still exist).
Archiving of data is not given a second thought by most business/IT people. Data is archived to a media, generally off-line, and never accessed again. Being off-line it’s out of the reach of knowledge mining solutions (even simple solutions such as Isys).
I thought about this problem several years ago when searching archived data for our staff scientists/engineers. I would spend several hours per week retrieving documents that were used for their knowledge content. I had plenty of space available so I moved all 10 years of archives (nearly all documents and spreadsheets) back on-line to an old server which was an instant hit with the staff. A lot of time was saved by staff because previous knowledge was used/referred to.
Key employees leave companies taking their expertise with them and leaving behind valuable knowledge in the form of documents etc.
This poses a question. If companies accumulate knowledge and it is stored in the form of data and this data is archived because no-one gives a rats about data content, only last accessed date, then what is happening to the knowledge of your average company? Is knowledge being archived along with useless data?