All around your organization, thousands of actions and interactions are happening every minute. Imagine if you could store them all, then easily and instantly recall any one from this giant “corporate memory.” Just think what level of added value that could create for your business. Thanks to a combination of enhanced recording capabilities, virtually unlimited storage at minimal cost, and vastly improved search software, this will be possible — and is likely to start happening — on a corporate scale within the next decade.

It is already possible on an individual, human level. I proved this in the MyLifeBits experiment when, from 1998 to 2008, I explored recording as much of my life as possible — every conversation, every email, every web page I browsed, every document I owned, every place I visited. I even wore a camera that took a photograph every 20 seconds and stored the image. This created a vast “e-memory” that I am easily able to call on at any time. I call this “lifelogging.”

Transposed into the workplace, creating a similar corporate e-memory would mean digitally recording and retaining, for example: all internal and external meetings, customer calls and transactions; all documents and correspondence; every item of inventory; a digital identity for everything a manufacturer produces, whether it is 
a car, an electrical appliance or an item of clothing, for its entire lifetime (thanks to the connected chips that will be embedded in most items); all expert knowledge and insight; and so on.

For this corporate “lifelogging” to deliver maximum benefits, however, it is vital for everyone in the organization to save everything, all the time. “Don’t delete” should become a corporate mantra. Most organizations currently have a policy of getting rid of things, but there cannot possibly be any value in destroying all this knowledge. Of course, the true value lies not in storing all this data, but in being able to retrieve it and make sense of it — which is becoming increasingly quick and easy. And this value will be augmented as our ability to search speech and images increases.

I realize that many CIOs feel they are being swamped by a data deluge and will worry that what I am proposing will only make it worse. However, the era of “big data” is already upon us, and we are only just beginning to work out how to deal with it. Millennials, in particular, are retaining more and more of their digital lives and, as they enter organizations, will bring these habits with them.

I learned during my experiment that the way to ensure the data creates value, rather than overwhelms you, is to keep good archives and have quick and easy processes for retrieval. The same principle applies to the enterprise, and cloud computing facilitates this. Without it, the masses of data would be too disparate — if you can’t get at the data and combine it, it becomes worthless.

The job of exploiting the data will become increasingly important: and that will fall to the CIO. The challenge will be to locate and store all these corporate actions, interactions and transactions, understand as much of their context as possible, and combine and exploit them for the good of the company. The CIOs who succeed at this will be the stars of the future.

• The book in which Gordon Bell recounts his MyLifeBits experiment, Total Recall: How the E-memory Revolution Will Change Everything, is out now.

Gordon Bell is a genuine IT industry luminary. Rightly credited as the father of the minicomputer (the progenitor of the modern server) for his design work on the PDP and Vax systems at Digital Equipment in the 1960s and ’70s, he went on to pioneer scalable systems by co-founding Encore Computer and Ardent Computer. He is currently a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, where his interests extend to cloud computing and “extreme lifelogging.”