It happens innocently enough: someone obtains and installs a reasonable Internet-enabled capability, and BANG! You’re open for business that’s not of your choosing.
Maybe it’s a shared corporate meeting calendar, or a construction pipe-weld inspection robot, or a security camera at a remote power plant. But whatever it is – be it a cloud-based offering or an Internet “thing” – it has to be remembered that if you can monitor or control it from wherever you are, so can the bad guys.
Can’t sleep.
Can’t sit still.
Can’t concentrate.
No doubt about it, I have Post-Election Stress Disorder (PESD).
I beg you: put down the chalupa, back away from the ledge, and don’t worry, be happy. Whether your candidate won or lost, our IG-related PESD is nothing we can’t handle – together.
Spare us the anthropomorphism – infogov solutions are just tools. They’re neither good nor bad, transformative nor ordinary, effective nor ineffective. They simply are what they are.
We, on the other hand, project our own expectations and perspectives upon them and characterize them accordingly, even when we don’t prepare ourselves properly for their use.
A hammer used to bang nails into wood is thought to be a good thing. A hammer used to crush a skull isn’t. But in the end, it’s just a hammer. The goodness and badness is all us.
The same is true of any software solution you can think of, for whether it ends up throwing off business value – without which we would classify it as “bad” – is entirely up to us.
If we don’t do our diligence up front by first thinking through our requirements and our budgets and our timetables, we risk dooming our entire project to disappointment. Not because our solutions are no good, but because – just as with hammers – it’s not their fault if they aren’t used properly.
They are, after all, just tools.
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
– George Bernard Shaw
In the same way, businesspeople and IT folk often are separated by a single phrase: “information quality.”
Both cite it as a prime information governance objective, but when you get right down to it, they don’t always use it to mean the same thing.
For the business set, “quality” is typically defined in terms of accuracy – as in, is the data before me factually correct?
For the technology-minded, “quality” is generally defined in terms of integrity – as in, is the data I’m working with secure and unaltered?
