Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (11 page)

The engineer who took over for Jon also took over his e-memories.

YOUR REPUTATION

The Total Recall revolution will enable you to be the kind of employee or entrepreneur or small businessperson who gets more things accomplished, is more trustworthy, and more creative. The better you use Total Recall technology, the better your professional reputation will be.

Productivity gains will come from understanding one’s work habits better. With a detailed e-memory of what I do, my computer is my personal time-management consultant. I can look back over my activity logs and notice where I’ve spent too much time on low-priority projects, or took too little time at a key place, or burned up a surprising number of hours reading Internet news. Mary Czerwinski’s lab at Microsoft Research has come up with some brilliant visualizations of time spent at the computer based on keyboard and mouse activity associated with each running application. Most people are horrified at how often they are interrupted and at the time expended on overhead in their typical day. In the future, not only will we glean insight from such post hoc visualizations, we will program our cyber consultants to send us alerts and real-time reports to keep our time management on track.

Where there is repetition, Total Recall can spot it and take some of the drudgery away. How many times do we fill in the same form with nearly the same information, or very similar forms? Already most Web browsers have some sort of autofill feature to help us fill in online forms, but this can go much further. I get a lot of e-mails from students applying for internships, and I respond to most of them with one of a handful of stock replies running the gamut from “Unfortunately we have no openings now” to “We would be delighted to consider you.” Software will soon arrive that will detect an e-mail as an application, dig into my e-mail history, and present me with a list of boilerplate options. Then replying to the current applicant is a breeze; it can be as quick as simply typing her name over the original name after the opening “Dear,” or it might involve typing in a de novo paragraph that’s specifically pertinent to her application.

Of course, boilerplate can easily go too far. Lawyers are already well down this road, where cut-and-paste is leading to a bloat in legal writing. I have hundreds of e-mails from attorney friends consisting of six words that were actually typed followed by a page of dire warnings and disclaimers. There will be misuse as with any technology, and that won’t help your reputation, but this branch of workplace technology has only begun to fulfill its enormous timesaving destiny. And to make certain employees look extremely productive.

In general, Total Recall in the workplace means we stop doing so much work for the computer and the computer does more work for us. The software is inexorably moving from simple searches of huge e-memory databases to tools that manage the information coming out of e-memory so that it is especially relevant to the task at hand. Not a filing cabinet, but a sort of personal assistant. For example, Bradley Rhodes of MIT and his colleagues developed the “Remembrance Agent,” an experimental piece of software that monitors your typing and reminds you of relevant e-mails or documents. If you are composing an e-mail and type “Project Anvil,” the agent will bring up e-mails and documents matching those words on the side of your screen, ready for you to click open. In the same vein, Xobni has software to assist you with your e-mail. When you select an e-mail, it shows you contact information about the person the e-mail is from, a list of your recent e-mails, and a list of files you have shared with each other. Software assistants put information at your fingertips before you even ask for it.

Beyond being more efficient at the workplace or worksite—wherever that may be—when you are asked professional questions, you will be able to give an answer based on fact, not blurry bio-memories. You will be more reliable.

I often receive “remember me?” e-mails followed by some set of “action items”—to which I draw a complete blank. There are scores of former colleagues and potential business partners from decades back who try to contact me every month. It’s not unreasonable, from their point of view, to expect me to remember them—many of them I worked with closely. Fortunately, about twenty years after leaving DEC, I was allowed to get my old files. They included eleven years’ worth of correspondence, including hundreds of e-mails (which we had used throughout the 1980s, more than a decade before e-mail went mainstream). Those old communications have proved invaluable for cuing recollection of people from my past. I’m sure these contacts now think of me as someone they can better rely on; first to remember them, and then to actually recall details of connections in our work history.

Sometimes I want to dig up peripheral people rather than someone already designated as a contact in my address book, and having everything saved usually makes this easy. I can search through old e-mails from a friend to find one that includes the name of his son. Or I may just search through everything I have for a “who the hell is that?” name and end up glad I scanned the program of the workshop that includes her name.

You never know what will be helpful. Before I really got religion on the “more is better” gospel, I tried to talk Vicki out of scanning all my old high school yearbooks. “How could that be of any use?” I asked. Fortunately she ignored my protests, and lo and behold a few years later I received an e-mail from a Dr. Tom Hill, a successful entrepreneur turned corporate team-building consultant, asking me for some biographical information so that he could describe my work in Tom Hill’s Friday Eaglezine. He identified himself as being a 1953 graduate from the same high school that I had graduated from in 1952, but his name didn’t ring any bells for me. A search for “Tom Hill” in the yearbooks pulled back photos and descriptions of various activities that brought the high school memories flooding back. When we spoke, I was able to recall half-forgotten events and people we’d clearly known in common, which made for a pleasant conversation. I’m now part of his Eagle network.

The “who the hell” problem only gets worse with a person’s age. With the advent of social networking sites such as LinkedIn, “remember me?” messages and invitations to join yet another group are constantly pouring in. By hanging on to three decades’ worth of e-mails, business cards, meeting appointments, photos, and audio recordings and using MyLifeBits to group and interlink them, my contact management has reached a whole new level.

What you may scorn today may one day turn out to be practically useful. A key reason people leave established companies to form start-ups is to get away from the numerous and stultifying rules and procedures. Ironically, one of the first things they miss is some of that important red tape. In 1988 I was head of engineering at a start-up, and we realized we needed a product release process. Thankfully, we saved a lot of time when an employee turned up a copy of the release process document from Sun Microsystems. It was equivalent to a process we had used at DEC, so it didn’t take much work to turn it into something I was happy with. I continue to receive requests from others in the same boat for items like DEC’s engineering handbooks.

As work experience becomes more of a scientific record and less of a befuddled bio-memory, your work time will become more creative. First, you simply won’t have to argue about what happened anymore, and second, the interconnectivity of e-memory records will free you to make new associations.

THE E-MEMORY ENTERPRISE

At the same time Total Recall is changing your work experience, it will be changing it for everyone else. Certain organizations will make better use of it than others. Many of them will make office e-memories available to everyone who has a similar job within the company or institution. It’s safe to predict that the same trends in technology that will lead individuals to use e-memories will also lead organizations to make the most of the new technology. Many will soon be keeping everything from internal meetings, e-mails, and memos to external-facing activities like sales, customer support, and purchasing. And making it searchable, usable information.

Time management, knowledge mining, trend discovery, context-sensitive reminding, and other computer assistance will also be applied to the institution’s broader memory. SRI, the institute where Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964, is managing an extensive DARPA-funded research program called the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO). CALO presumes a corporate digital memory, and rather than requiring users to learn all of its ins and outs, it learns from its users and from the material their organization produces. It learns about people’s needs, routines, and expectations to become a real assistant that can be proactive. Software companies such as DEVON are already pursuing directions like this with products like DEVONthink, which aims to detect complex and subtle connections between documents that can stimulate new ideas.

Another example of progress in this area is a collaboration between MIT and Hewlett-Packard known as DSpace. Launched in 2002, DSpace is an open-source software package designed to accommodate an institution’s entire body of records, resources, and output, including books, aging microfilm, administrative records, audio recordings of classroom lectures, video recordings of speeches and events, scientific research data, published papers, student theses, 3-D models and scans of objects, and any other kind of digital information. The software includes a search engine and the ability for users to tag information in order to create useful trails and associations not present in the original data sets. DSpace has been adopted by hundreds of universities and research centers worldwide.

I expect Sprint will make Jon Gilmore’s memories about a cell tower available to any engineer who works on the tower, not just his successor. Likewise, repair divisions, like that of Xerox, use a common knowledge base to share diagnosis and repair information; all technicians inherit the memory of the one who first solves a particular problem, and get notes and tips for each model and type of breakdown. So when a technician first encounters error message #104 on model C900, the stories of a couple of previous repairs are instantly available, along with a tip to check for foreign material in the paper feeder before assuming the module needs replacement.

Customer service would sure be a lot better with a divisional memory. I can’t wait for my mobile phone provider to get onboard with this, because I’m sick of endlessly recounting the same story during a series of calls to different representatives, not to mention battling their skepticism toward my claims of what previous representatives have advised me. The next step is to make the memories accessible across the whole company. I want the wireless Internet troubleshooter I speak with to have access to, say, the billing memory to connect the dots when billing is really the issue. I’ve spent enough hours of my life on hold being passed around between specialists from that company, because the right hand doesn’t know what the left has been doing.

The march toward institutional e-memory has begun because the adoption of digital storage and communications makes recording and retrieval just too cheap and advantageous to pass up—especially in a competitive corporate environment. Keeping e-mails, instant-message chat sessions, and transaction records is obvious. With all bits of communication becoming virtually interchangeable you can generate voice from an instant message, or use voice-to-text to search for e-mail. Whenever I call my bank or insurance company, the first words from the corporate mouth are either “This call is being recorded for training purposes” or “This call is being recorded for your protection.” In a call involving stock purchase or sale, it is not uncommon for two agents to be involved and to verify the correctness of a verbal transaction. In companies such as Hartford Insurance, all sales calls are recorded along with all the interactions to the various databases that make up a call, making it possible to virtually recreate the full interaction and its associated data. In the next few years, we will see calls like these being converted to text so that when the customer calls again, the company representative will have the transcripts up on-screen during the call.

In addition to all communications, inventory is going to be tracked in greater and greater detail. Just as you have come to expect Federal Express to know the history of the packages you ship, construction companies will know the history of every sheet of drywall they use, and sporting-good manufacturers will know about every baseball glove they make from the time it is “born” to the point of sale.

The same trend will apply to individual tools and pieces of equipment. Each item will carry its own unique network identity so its usage can be logged and tracked, including who used it, where, and when. For instance, I presume that banks already know which ATMs are being used, along with when and by whom, as well as who is servicing them and when. This kind of fine-grained logging and tracking will expand to virtually everything: a dentist’s drill, a gasoline pump, an inventory scanner in a warehouse, an espresso machine at Starbucks. It will even include meeting rooms, which may have audio recording in addition to just the log. The traffic of people through public spaces will be studied and learned from.

I like to think about how Total Recall might have impacted my father’s business, Bell Electric. Dad started the company in 1933, and ran it until he had a heart attack in 1985. Bell Electric sold, installed, and repaired electrical appliances and equipment. A large NCR cash register printed a record of all the transactions that went through it. The main ledger tracked purchases, sales, electrical installations, and repairs. Bills were sent out monthly. Every year, he would close the shop for a day to take inventory.

An e-memory for Bell Electric would subsume Dad’s ledgers and various record books. All of his personal knowledge of his customers would be in customer-relations management tools. Instead of flipping through the W. W. Grainger catalog of electrical equipment, and dealing with paper orders, invoices, and receipts, Dad would order from their Web site and save all the transactions electronically. Having to order a weird replacement part for a pump would be much easier the second time around because he would instantly recall the first order. Inventory would be known continuously, and the complete history of a certain customer could be recalled in a moment. The flow of customers to the store would be analyzed to recommend the best hours to keep and when to take holidays with a minimum impact on the bottom line. Dad would know his profit by employee, by customer, and by type of job. When one employee followed up on the work of another, he’d have the former’s e-memories, and know there was a second circuit panel in the family room, that the wires had nonstandard colors in the kitchen, and not to call the customer after nine P.M. Dad would learn to manage his own time better, based on his lifelog.