Data is currency. Its value is real when it is exchanged.
Remember the first time you jumped on a ride at an amusement park which started slowly and then and accelerated so quickly it took your breath away? That’s a good analogy for the acceleration of change at which companies collect and share data.
If you are responsible for risk – you better be paying attention to how people in the company are collaborating!
Two different articles/blogs that I read today made me start thinking about the short window of opportunity that exists for companies to get their act together about how they manage, track and control the data that is being shared between and among other companies – or “what governance means in today’s world of sharing data.”
It all started this morning when I read an article in the WSJ that described an 18 month effort by a group of French organizations to select and reject ‘Informatique en Nuage’ as the French term for ‘cloud computing’. It mentioned that ‘courriel’, the French word for email, took the same path, and presumably the same amount of time. Hmm– Better get cracking because it’s not that cloud computing will go away but we’ll be moving on to more things quickly! Faster – Faster - Faster
Next, I read one of Frank Kenney’s blogs. Frank knows more about the breadth of managing data across the spectrum that anyone else I know. I happen to know he agrees that process and people are critical when implementing the techniques for dealing with the way you manage, control and track data throughout an organization. It’s really about the process and the people! The reason is that technologies will continue to change.
In Frank Kenney’s October 13th blog, he pointed out that Microsoft’s Skydrive lets users drag and drop almost any type of data into a Skydrive folder – viola! Those items are in the cloud. Once in the cloud, the data is outside the purview of your security policies, your data retention policies, your capability to track or monitor! How easy is it to get a Skydrive account? Anyone who has a hotmail or Window’s Live account can download it free. Who might use one? The answer is anyone who wants to share documents with someone. Especially someone outside of their company, whether or not the reason for sharing is legitimate.
Frank also pointed out that Google Docs just announced (October 13th) shared folders. It allows you to upload documents into folders. Guess what, those documents can be shared. Who can get Google docs? Answer is: It is free for anyone with signs up for Google email and then downloads Google Apps. Who might use shared folders? The answer is anyone who wants to share documents with someone. Especially someone outside of their company, whether or not the reason for sharing is legitimate.
The actual point is that between these two apps – it’s not who does have access, but who does not. And when you look at who does not need to collaborate to get their job done – that’s the same list as who does not need to use email. Who does not need to share documents – it’s someone who never attaches a document to email. Who might want to use one of those services? Anyone whose file might have been too big, email was too slow, anyone who has felt pain points when trying to collaborate, permissions got in the way, more than one person had to updates at a time, anyone who had problems with the versions of a document that was passed among multiple participants, anyone who tried to share a document when two companies were using different versions of same software to edit a document and on and on, just to name a few off the top of my head. So almost everyone falls in this list!
Go read Frank’s blog for more on the topic!
The connection between the WSJ article and Frank’s blog was a need to tell the world to – Hurry – Hurry- Hurry!
Let’s look at some data about data.
We could start at the beginning - data exists in databases, in applications, in email, and in all the various unstructured modes.
First, there was data collection.
By today’s standards the database market moved at a glacial pace. In the 1970’s, IBM research created SQL.
In 1977, the three founders of Oracle noticed an article in the IBM technical journal which inspired them to pick up a fateful CIA contract. Upon early completion of that project, they decided to commercialize the database. The project codename: Oracle. For brevity I’ll skip over the role other companies’ played* the first SQL standard was released 16 years later. I have heard mention from attendees of a famous meeting when executives from Oracle, IBM and a other key database players agreed to play by a set of established rules** which created the database market we know today. The rules had taken 16 years in committees to reach consensus. By the early 90’s, one of the top issues for CIO’s was – “Standardizing on a single database.” By the late 90’s CIO’s had moved onto ‘Standardize on a single enterprise application’.
It is interesting to note that the idea of collaborating on data in a database is not something that was possible through database calls – it was typically accomplished cross domain through an application.
There are many other technologies we could talk about – but let’s jump to email.
If you want to look at where email began, I’d start with Ray Tomlinson’s decision in the 70’s to extend sndmsg and readmail across the network. He decided to use user@host - the same email addressing scheme we use today. Not too much later, Lawrence Roberts put in a three day weekend to add a few fundamental features (save, delete and queues). It was a practical solution to a practical problem! Not too different from web 2.0 development today.
The pace of commercialization was very different! Sendmail in the 80’s, MCI in 1988, AOL
1993 were the beginning of the huge proliferation of email usage. Now we see estimates that say that over 80% of all US residents have at least one email account. There were three players in the enterprise space – Novel, Microsoft, and Lotus. Back in June of ‘95, there was an ad in CIO magazine that touted electronic mailing lists devoted to virtually every topic imaginable. By 2009 standards, I doubt that list could pass the ‘every topic imaginable’ test, but the ad was on to something. By 2004 we saw the email volumes doubling each year and the email archiving market exploding. So we had reached a point where enterprises knew they had to have a policy and were buying tier first iteration of technology to enforce the policy.
But next technology keeps rolling. As enterprises were struggling to put email archiving, and or journaling, and email policies in place, here came Instant Messaging (IM). At first enterprises ignored it. Then they said don’t use it. Then some said, OK we will archive it.
Blogging came along, then Social Media. In 2006 tweeting started, in 2009 – Skydrive and Google Docs file sharing have shown up. You get the picture.
In my opinion, no one can possibly keep up writing individual policies for data collection and collaboration!
You aren’t being responsible if you don’t recognize the risk of ignoring what’s going on in this space.
My advice:
- Create a data management policy!
- Keep it simple.
This can be accomplished by defining your vocabulary, approach, etc, in a single place.
Document any assumptions. (Example: the policy owner is different than the policy reviewer.) - Keep the policy technology agnostic.
The implementation of the policy may involve technology! - Assign ownership for the policy implementation.
- Assign policy review dates – at least every 6 months.
*(Apologies to the other key players such as Sybase, Microsoft, etc., whose contributions I am leaving out!)
**The first SQL language were issued by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)in 1986,and later updates were released as International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards.