For every success story on the move towards social business, there are more examples where collaborative software didn’t take off. When you sit down and ask why, it becomes apparent that the issue isn’t always that people don’t want to collaborate. They just don’t want to do it in a forced manner.
Not too long ago, an enticing chocolate chip cookie recipe was shared on twitter. It looked quite tasty and I pondered how much better they would taste with bacon. Then it occurred to me, why not make a batch, half with bacon, half without?
This idea didn’t come from nowhere. Before I was known as Pie, I had a reputation for eating cookies. Fresh cookies was an easy way to get my attention or bribe me. This tendency is genetic as my uncle married my aunt after she brought him a fresh baked pie.
Before I get any hungrier, let’s talk about the recipe.
Welcome to weird, mystical world where we are now permitted to get rid of expired information. I phrase it like that because we live in a world where we are permitted to dispose of information, but never automatically.
How many hours are lost reviewing information in order to determine if it is okay to remove? How much information is kept because we are unsure? Why do we even need to get rid of information?
That last question is easy to answer and not in the way you expect.
I have attended a lot of conferences and events over the course of my career. The last year alone was busy with conferences hosted by vendors, analyst firms, associations, and motivated people. After watching a particularly busy conference week on twitter I realized something.
Most vendor conferences stink.
Seriously. Most are simply training. You go for product updates and see what is coming down the road. Even if you filter through the marketing, you only get facts on how to make the tool do the job better. You don’t actually become better.
As for the other conferences, there is a lot of variation. The key variable? Great conferences are about ideas, imagination, passion, and inspiration.
Protecting our information is, in many ways, the trickiest concept in making Information Governance profitable. To many people, it is the same as controlling information. After all, how can you protect information if you don’t control it first?
I have a better question. How can you protect information if you don’t capture and organize it? How can you even control something that you aren’t protecting?
The real problem is that too many organizations blend control and protect into one concept or set of rules. They are distinct and need to be treated as such.
This post could readily talk about the disappearance of privacy in private. From Nixon to Sterling, private conversations have been recorded and shared for years. Whenever you have a private conversation, you are trusting the people you are talking with to not share it with others beyond any implied understanding.
Being out in public has traditionally offered up more privacy. Any spy movie you watch throws in at least one scene base upon that fact. They always meet in a public spot where there are a ton of witnesses but nobody who will notice two people talking. Why would they? There are people having conversations everywhere.
All that is changing.
I am not talking a police state or about all the cameras that are going up everywhere for public safety. There are a lot of siloed systems inside individual establishments that are not linked to a broader network. The world of 1984 is not here yet, no matter what television tells us.
I’m talking about social media.
There has been a lot going around the net in the last few weeks about sexism in the tech world. These issues are not new, nor are they limited to tech. I am shocked, disgusted, sad, and disappointed that these things happen. We are all supposed to be better than this. At the same time, people always seems to find a way to demonstrate the worst traits of our species.
Everyone talks about getting more women into technology and STEM as a whole. We, as in the men, need to work harder to make them more welcome. That isn’t just getting them in the door, it is making sure that once they come through they are treated as equals and not as a token female or “one of the boys”.
At this point, I’ve covered the first two Content Management steps towards achieving the proper Information Governance, knowing. The remaining steps are ones that the industry executes fairly well today, at least from a technical perspective. It just feels like a failure because we historically fail to Capture and Organize content properly.
The third step is Control. Control is something that most organizations have mastered, perhaps a little too well. If a piece of content gets into the system, locking it down is easy. The challenge here is not the technology, but the basic approach to controlling content.
It has been an interesting few years. As I approach the 7th anniversary of this blog, I was prodded to look at my journey by Gina Minks. She wrote a post about how to take advantage of experts and evangelists without them turning into obnoxious tools. (Her words were not as kind) She was asking as much as sharing.
This is a tough one. As you become recognized as an expert, it is a little intoxicating. You want to keep the recognition while still maintaining the credibility that got you there. Opportunities come along and you have to decide which ones will let you keep your soul and which ones will require you to cross that line that Gina was warning about.
Let’s start with my journey as a point of reference.
I was going to write a nice, calm post today when I came across Ralph Losey’s piece on the Heartbleed bug. It is a long piece and you can tell it was written by a lawyer. I have nothing against lawyers as two of my oldest and closest friends are lawyers. I’ve met and talked to Ralph before. He is a smart guy and general understands how technology can change the world. Ralph simply misses the point on Open Source.
Completely misses it.
This was a bug that was not caught before release, the same as happens in proprietary software. I know as I’ve released a few bugs in my day.
Word of Pie 