A number of years ago, I had a job that required getting a bunch of different groups to agree to a common approach to working with our customers. Each team had designed a process that was centered around their particular role: pre-sales engineering, sales, professional services design and delivery and post-sales services delivery. Each process was similar but not identical and each had its strong advocates.

What I found was that no single person or group could understand the details, advantages or disadvantages of all the competing processes.

We didn't have time, nor would it have been productive to get everyone to understand the details, advantages and disadvantages of all the other processes. So, rather than try to get everyone to understand every other process, I created what I later called a 'Rosetta Stone'.

The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egyptian artifact which was important as a multilingual stele that allowed linguists to begin the process of hieroglyph decipherment. Because Egypt's historical records and monuments were inscribed with hieroglyphics, a language no one could read, the secrets of Egypt's past were hopelessly lost. That is, until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. The stone went through a number of ownership claims before it came into British hands and was finally translated and realized for the important ability to decipher hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). By using the Rosetta Stone as a translation device, scholars revealed more than 1,400 years of ancient Egyptian secrets. Today, the term Rosetta Stone has become idiomatic as something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem.

Back to my modern example of a "Rosetta Stone" for managing through a problem. Our group defined 6 phases of the customer project life cycle and then asked each team to organize their process steps and deliverables to each phase. By organizing to this neutral and indisputably important “Rosetta Stone”, we were able to align all 4 independent processes. We were could able identify overlaps and eliminate duplication by picking the best of similar processes. We were also able to then better serve customers by understanding and sharing knowledge from group to group and phase to phase.

Ever since, I've become a big advocate of creating “Rosetta Stones” to take a difficult problem, find the common language and find meaning. I think as we get more and more specialized it may be the best way to find our commonality. For example, the English language has become the “Rosetta Stone” language for the world at this point in time.

The reason I've been thinking about this lately is that we are working with a number of institutions and different academic and research disciplines around some common problems. Last week, I met with people from the U.C. Berkeley Media Vault Program. The U.C. Berkeley Media Vault applies proven curatorial archiving and preservation methods with services available to the campus that address the needs of those who manage and want to provide access to digital media collections. The staff was explaining that how art historians describe paintings is entirely different and incomprehensible to the ways of how we laymen would describe a painting. The question was, how could we agree on a common way to describe the descriptors (meta-data)? Consider the number of objects in a physical museum and the number of disciplines that need to know from their unique perspective what is in that museum. The problem spins exponentially out of control very quickly when you consider the number of digital objects produced and recorded each day on the internet.

In thinking about this issue, for U.C. Berkeley, its affiliates and for the different academic and researchers Sun meets with everyday, I can't help but advocate to think “Rosetta Stone”. For institutions must learn to think of how their stakeholders differing processes, definitions and beliefs have commonalities. Once we decipher the commonalities, we can find the hidden language that will reveal the solution to cataloging long-term digital storage as a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act for multi-generations. This, of course, is only one example. Building communities also benefits from common purpose. Communities become a living entity that help us decipher meaning from our interactions with others in similar situations, with similar challenges but perhaps different processes. Looking across the educational, political and societal structures, we must determine a reliable way to transmit and store knowledge with our own “Rosetta Stones”. Communities can help take us there by starting valuable conversations that reveal our commonalities.

I didn’t know much (or as much as I should have) about World War II until I watched Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's recent documentary, THE WAR. WWII was repeatedly given short shrift in my world history classes: by the time we got to the 20^th century, too little time was left in the school year to do it justice. I knew the big story lines and the significance of places like Guadalcanal and the beaches of Normandy , but I never really understood the enormity of the challenge and the physical geography that was affected until Ken Burns gave us the gift of his epic documentary.

To make this film, Burns and his team collected thousands of images and film sequences from hundreds of archives around the world, including a few personal archives. He describes the process in this video. “It's a digital world,” he says.

This fact—and the importance of finding a way to preserve our shared cultural history—hit home for me, in a very personal way, this past weekend.

This summer, I heard a presentation from Dave Price, head of Systems and e-Research Services the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The Bodleian Library has been around for some 400 years, and like many of the big old libraries on the planet, has as a primary mission the preservation of scholarly and other materials.

For much of the past 400 years, library and preservation technology or science hasn’t changed all that much. The first card catalog seems to have been invented at the Bodleian in 1674. Dewey invented his decimal system in 1876. The process of cataloging and preserving texts has been around for a while. But over the past 50 years, things started changing dramatically because of the sheer volume of content combined with multiple and competing recording technologies such as microfilm and microfiche. Today, most content is “born digital,” and everything that is not (like my stepdad's WWII photos) is being converted to digital formats.

It would be easy to assume that preserving digital content would be easier than the previous “analog” or paper versions. After all, paper starts decomposing after so many years. But bits (of data) rot as well. Disks and tape wear out and fail. Protocols and document formats change. Try opening a word processing document from 10 years ago, and you’ll see how big the problem will be in 400.

As a result, the management and preservation task facing organizations like the Bodleian Library, The Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France is immense. These institutions must come to grips with the new challenge that digital content creates if this content is to survive and be readable by those in the next 400 years. That's why Sun and some of the greatest libraries on the planet have founded the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG). We hope to help these new “cybrarians” form a community to share best practices for preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials and to help design new products and solutions.

I guarantee that our Sun engineers weren't thinking about the problem of preserving scholarly documents for the next 400 years when they invented some of the great hardware and software that they have. But regardless of whether it’s library documents, my stepdad’s pictures of WWII or medical images to help cure diseases, it’s great to a part of making—or at least preserving—history.