Walled Fortresses, Membranes and Iconoclasms

The world is getting more real and less real all the time … every day that goes by.

One of the key reasons, I believe, is that we thought we knew something about other parts of the world before the Internet came along … there were newspapers and telvision shows that showed us something about those other parts. But of course they were just what the filters that are newspapers and televsion shows decide to tell us. Now, the Internet has spawned email and these ungainly, awkward, not-yet-approved things called blogs, which are supplementing and complementing web sites.

Information flows much much faster, and from places around the globe, and it’s not filtered as it was until very recently, by journalists, editors, scriptwriters and producers. There are more versions of what “truth” or “consequences” might be, out there. It’s not quite as official as it used to be.

And of course there’s the workplace and corporations, where many adults spend most of their waking hours. What has the Internet brought to this component of the modern world ?

Back in the olden days, pre-Internets (as George Bush would say ;-), corporations went to significant lengths to protect corporate secrets … as one would suppose they should. Maintaining a competitive advantage depended upon it.

Not only that, but the customers and clients of a corporation were outside the walls of the fortress corporation. Employees planned products, built what they would offer to clients and customers and delivered the same, all from the protection offered by the walls and turrets … whatever came inside depended upon the scouts and other means the corporations had of reconnoitering outside the walls of the fortress.

Even the introduction of information systems into the corporation … generally to create efficiencies … didn’t change this dynamic all that much. Oh, they opened secret trap doors to allow electronic data interchange with suppliers and certain vendors, but what the corporation did was still inside the walls, and the doors at the entrance to the fortress were usualluy pulled up. Every once in a while, they might lower the doors – in the form of … oh, let’s call them focus groups, or maybe even outside consultants … but basically the front gates stayed pulled up tight.

But, along came this thing called the Internet … followed by the Web. And people everywhere started using it. First and foremost they used email … to communicate with each other, and even to communicate with people in other corporations, and sometimes even their friends. Gradually, people outside the walls who were their customers started using it … both amongst themselves, to check what others’ experiences had been with that corporation … and also as a means of asking questions of the corporation about their products and service ,… or even worse, to make demands of the corporation with respect to the design, usefulness or other practical aspoects of the corporations products and services. This all started happening in about 1996 or 1997.

This was followed by a quaint social and not-quite-commercial phenomenon called the dot.com boom. At first it seemed like this would be quite the revoultion in the conduct of normal affairs. New companies were started, the uniforms forced upon workers began to change as they went and worked for these new companies, which often seemed as if they wanted their worketrs to be more like humans and less like semi-mindless robots .. young people actually thought it might be more interesting, more fun and more challenging (in positive ways) to do this for a living than what they thought their parents, the school authorities and the people who were thinking of emplying them, had in mind. But it wasn’t quite the right mix of ideas and capabilities yet … the sociology hadn’t yet caught up to the possibilities that seemed clear and accessible. Thus, there was a dot.com bust.

And the old fogeys who were the proprietors and the custodians of the fortresses wiped their brows, saying “whew, that was close” … and cracked the whip. Back to busyness, everybody … and don’t get any smart ideas like that again … you’re here to work for us. This retrenchment was followed closely by an event that galvanized the world – 911 – and the subsequent actions … of protecting everyone against the possibility of a raining down of fire and brimstone from all directions occasioned a very real reaction of corporations everywhere “battening down the hatches”, and making it a very risky thing indeed to consider innovations, or sharing information.

However, corporations did not count on a significant aspect of the earlier problem remaining in play. No one thought to take down or dismantle the Internets. Oh, some actually did think of it, but because it was ostensibly supposed to be for everybody and not just for the coproations, they actually tried to find all sorts of ways of controlling its use through legislation. And some corporations actually volunteered to put protection-and-coontrol mechanisms (usually called DRM, or digital rights management) inside the machines that connected people to the Internets and thus to each other. The governments got involved with this issue pretty quickly too, as a few smart wags realized that the possibility of openness and transparency afforded by the Web was threatening the ways things had always been done.

but because the Web fundamentally connects people to other people, via email and access to web sites and blogs, it began to become apparentto everybody that the walls of the fortresses were actually much more like permeable membranes, through which awareness and knowledge could, if permitted, flow as if aided by osmosis. This of course was rightly judged to be dangerous, as control of peoples’ activities and energies depends on the information and understanding available to them. This was a risk to be managed.

These types of risks had been managed quite effectively for at least a half-century by the reward and punioshment schemes and dynamics of hierarchically-structured organizations … reporting relationships (wherein the guy who sat behind you in English Lit at university was only a C student but had a more sizeable dollop of ambition and ruthlessness or sycophancy in his soul) or compensation and performance management schemes whereby one could acquire more whuffie for fitting in, going alonmg, or sucking up. But again … the Web began to be perceived as threatening this setup. Beware the smart dude who had ideas about how things could be done better, or who might blow the whistle, or who might point you to other sources of information that might contradict the corporate story.

And as blogs began to proliferate, in the mid ’00’s, and people even began to talk about how they might be used to give individuals … smart people who cared and knew how to find things out, or were smarter than their bosses .. avoice, it became clear pretty quickly that when all was said and done, blogs might be a democratizing force for people who worked with ideas and knowledge. Perish that thought ! and by all means don’t share it.

As it began to seem as if there might be a real possibility that employees working inside the walls (well, actually permeable membranes, as we’ve seen earlier … the walls are really only the vision, values and logo of the corporation) might begin to use blogs to work, interact, collaborate, along came the notion of “managing the risk” that this new form of communication had created. And, as with all good management science, a research report, complete with recommendations on appropriate generic policies, sprang forth on offer to the marketplace. Janus Risk Management, for example, used a proprietary methodology called Enterprise Threat Index (ETx ™), which uncovers and assesses Causal Threat and Risk Factors (CTRFs).

With respect to the threat posed by people thinking and then talking to each other on blogs, Janus analyzed and qualified the CTRFs, and issued a
strongly worded recommendation (warning ?) that corporations undertake to address Blog Threat Management. The key recommendation ? Treat blogs as another form of computer virus (thought viruses, I guess). While it’s probably already clear to most readers that this research analysis and report is essential at $995, notably for the “homeland” protection it offers to corporations, here’s a summary of why it’s so timely, important and valuable to upper management.

Blogging is rapidly emerging as a threat to Internet users.

This presentation provides specific information about how employees can reduce the risks associated with blogging and also at the end of the presentation there are three versions of a web log or blog policy.

My recommendation ? Whistle while you work .. it’ll make your day, and your life, go by more quickly.

But I’m an iconoclast, it seems.