Industrial archeology

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

One often hears the questions "Why are the Americans making a new super-heavy rocket if they had a Saturn V?" or “Why can't Russia make a super-heavy rocket if it had Energia ?. This text answers such questions well, although there are examples from outside the space industry.

Corporate memory and reverse smuggling

There are two kinds of corporate memory: people and documentation. People remember how things work and they know why. Sometimes they write this information somewhere and keep their records somewhere. This is called "documentation". Corporate amnesia works the same way: people leave, and records disappear, rot, or are simply forgotten.

I spent several decades working for a large petrochemical company. In the early 1980s, we designed and built a plant that converts some hydrocarbons into other hydrocarbons. Over the next 30 years, the corporate memory of this plant waned. Yes, the plant is still running and making money for the firm; maintenance is done, and highly intelligent specialists know what to pull and where to kick to keep the plant running.

But the company has completely forgotten how this plant works.

This was due to several factors:

The downturn in the petrochemical industry in the 1980s and 1990s forced us to stop hiring new people. In the late 1990s, there were guys under 35 or over 55 working in our group - with very few exceptions.

We slowly switched to computer-assisted design.

Due to corporate reorganizations, we had to physically move the entire office from place to place.

A corporate merger a few years later completely dissolved our firm into a larger one, causing a global restructuring of departments and a reshuffle of personnel.

Industrial archeology

In the early 2000s, several of my colleagues and I retired.

In the late 2000s, the company remembered the factory and thought it would be nice to do something with it. Let's say increase production. For example, you can find a bottleneck in the production process and improve it - the technology has not stood still for these 30 years - and, perhaps, add another workshop.

And then the company from all over the place is imprinted on the brick wall. How was this plant built? Why was it built this way and not otherwise? How exactly does it work? What is vat A needed for, why are workshops B and C connected by a pipeline, why does the pipeline have a diameter of exactly D and not D?

Corporate amnesia in action. Giant machines, built by aliens with the help of their alien technology, chomp as if they were running, giving out piles of polymers to the mountain. The company has a rough idea of how to maintain these machines, but has no idea what amazing magic is going on inside, and no one has the slightest idea of how they were created. In general, the people are not even sure what exactly to look for, and do not know from which side this tangle should be unraveled.

We are looking for guys who, during the construction of this plant, already worked in the company. They now occupy high positions and sit in separate, air-conditioned offices. They are given the task of finding documentation for the aforementioned plant. This is no longer corporate memory, it is more like industrial archeology. Nobody knows what kind of documentation for this plant exists, whether it exists at all, and if so, in what form it is stored, in what formats, what it includes and where it physically lies. The plant was designed by a no longer existing design team, in a company that has since been taken over, in an office that has been closed, using pre-computer-era techniques that no longer apply.

The guys remember their childhood with the obligatory swarming in the mud, roll up the sleeves of expensive jackets and get to work.

The first step of the search is obvious: you need to find out the name of the plant in question. It turns out that the workers call their place of work a name derived from the name of the city in which they are located - and this is the only logical moment in the whole history. The official name of the plant is quite different. Moreover, when it was being designed, it had a different official name, and the firm that contracted for its construction called it in its own way, but also quite officially. All four titles are used loosely and mixed in the documents.

In 1998, within the framework of the document flow improvement program, the plant was assigned a unique identification number. All documents related to the plant were to be marked with this number. In 2001, as part of the transition to electronic document management, the plant was assigned another unique identification number, but a different one. It is not known which document management system was used at the time of creation of each individual document; in addition, in the documents here and there references are made to some other document management systems, about which there is no information at all. Moreover, based on the documents, it is impossible to tell whether the identifier mentioned in the document is the identifier of this plant according to the 1998 regulations, or the identifier of some other plant according to the 2001 regulations - and vice versa.

In documents using the 1998 identifier, an indication of some kind of archive is constantly flickering. Paper. The problem is that, judging by the address, it was located in a building that was demolished long before 1998. This explains to some extent why the only documents stored digitally relate to the technical support of the plant, and not to its design and development.

By the method of indiscriminate telephone calls, it was possible to find an ancient saved backup of the e-mail server. From there, I managed to scoop up a certain amount of emails from people in the development department. The physical address is preserved in the signatures of these emails. There we managed to find information about the library of the development department - paper, paper library! - which, praise the gods, did not suffer during all the shuffles, but was simply lost. This library was found. It contained some documentation on the production of polymers, and even copies of some engineering drawings of the plant, made for the convenience of the development department. Huge sheets of blue tracing paper and giant, dusty, mildewed binders with faded notes. The records and tracing papers are stamped to certify that a digital copy has been taken from these documents; nobody knows where this digital copy is now.

Decryption of documentation

The guys from separate offices drag a pile of sprawling binders, point them to the engineers and say: "Fas!" Engineers are trying to find the bottleneck. It turns out badly. Firstly, the documentation is far from complete, and the documents are not entirely preserved, and secondly, it seems to be written in Chinese characters. That is, it is somewhat incomprehensible. The manager jokes about the need to introduce the course "Engineering Archeology" into the curriculum, where students will be taught to understand the technological process, based on shitty preserved documents from thirty years ago.

Engineers do not despair. They find ancient textbooks and, in fact, learn again, becoming engineers of the 1980 model. The perverts who have fun with electronics with radio tubes act in about the same way: since no one will undertake to repair such squalor, they have to study on their own.

Some of the methods and forms of recording are familiar, some are outdated long ago. Even where nothing has officially changed, a lot has changed anyway, because the very criterion of what needs to be documented and what can not be written down has changed, because every educated person will know this.

Lyrical digression:

Betelgeuse star

In ancient Greece, any boy knew the names and knew how to find about 300 of the brightest stars in the sky. In the travel notes of those times, the direction was indicated by the stars, but no one left a record of how one or another star could be found: it was assumed that since a person can read, he is guaranteed to know four or five stars. The names of the stars have changed since then …

It would be nice if these engineers ended up writing a great, beautiful book called What This Damn Factory Does And How It Works. Such books are often written today, not by engineers, but by archaeologists.

Reverse industrial espionage

At some point, one of the managers of this company contacted my former colleague, who maintained friendly relations with me. This allowed the company to reach out to us with a proposal: would we be so kind to spend some of our time advising the company about this damn plant? For an adequate fee, of course. The “adequate pay” was several times higher than my previous salary, and the job seemed interesting, so I agreed.

So I ended up being hired by the company to explain to her how her plant works.

I tensed and recalled some details from thirty years ago. Some of the engineering practices applied in the design of this plant, be it wrong, I myself have developed. Moreover, I had an idea of what is important and what is not, and how the details fit together.

It was about as important that I had a little bit of documentation. Illegal.

When I was still working for the firm, we often had to move from office to office, and documents were lost. Sometimes there was no other choice but to sit and wait all day for someone with access to send the necessary piece of paper, and for this it was still necessary to track down the right library and the right person. The company's paranoid security chiefs devised draconian rules for accessing classified information, that is, everything related to polymers, and this brutally complicated life when visiting contractors' offices.

Therefore, we have developed our own practice called “don't ask and we won't have to lie”. We made private copies of documents and carried them with us. Engineers generally hate to sit and toil with idleness, and the availability of documentation allowed us to quickly get to work. It also allowed us to turn in projects on time, instead of explaining that we couldn't work because we were waiting for a fax with the information we needed.

My task now was to secretly return the documents to the firm. I would have been glad to just come to the office and give them to the clerk, but it was not possible to do that. The company had these documents de jure, and even in electronic form, but I did not and could not have them de jure. In fact, of course, it was the opposite. But the company simply could not accept its documents that it has from a person who does not have them.

Instead, we smuggled them into the grounds and secretly planted the documents in the corporate archives. In paper form. During the next inventory, the controller may find documents without identification numbers, enter them into the document base and take care of making an electronic copy. I really hope that this will indeed be the case, because I’m unlikely to live another 30 years to smuggle them into the company again.

And, one more detail. I'm a hired external contract consultant, remember? My status is not supposed to know corporate secrets. The security service must be aware of the movement of classified information and prevent it from reaching any newcomer. The problem is, they don't have the slightest idea of the secrets, but I do. Moreover, I invented them, and patents were issued in my name. Nevertheless, I need to very secretly and secretly smuggle this data into the firm so that the security service will find out about it and can valiantly prevent my access to these secrets.

We often hear about industrial espionage. I would be glad to read research on the phenomenon of reverse industrial espionage - when companies forget their own secrets, and employees must secretly, illegally return them. I'm sure this happens more often than you think.

Does the problem have a solution?

I don't know what the moral of the story is.

Perhaps a better workflow organization would solve some of these problems. On the other hand, it was the attempts to improve the organization of document flow that caused some of these problems, so you need to be careful. It would be great if the department libraries were preserved. We solved the problem only because we were able to find one of them.

With the preservation of knowledge about technology and about the division into important and unimportant, it is even worse. Apparently, the best way would be to keep people of different ages in the company, without special age gaps, so that departments do not end up being decapitated when the older generation retires.