Surfing the Digital Wave

Some time ago I stumbled over an article in my favorite magazine, the Economist. The title was Surfing the Digital Wave, or drowning?  (Dec7, 2013). I have since read it a number of times, contemplating the consequences for many corporations.  Read it, I recommend! Click here.

In essence the message is; Corporate IT departments, please adapt, or die! The details reveal that it is not that straightforward but the following quote from the article basically describes the driving force many companies face these days.  “Demands for digitization are coming from every corner of the company. The marketing department would like to run digital campaigns. Sales teams want seamless connections to customers as well as to each other. Everyone wants the latest mobile device and to try out the cleverest new app. And they all want it now.”

And they all want it now… That is probably the key to many challenges these days ¬ we are no longer prepared to wait as our private digital sphere more often than not provides a much more dynamic set of productivity and connectivity tools than even modern corporate IT environments do.

The Economist, however, only touches on one major consequence of the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend, namely that of corporate IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) protection. “Above all they (IT bosses) must keep essential systems running—and safe.”  Yes, safe! Even if the digital social culture of the last decade has developed a completely new modus operandi for IPR protection in the media industry (that eventually opened up for models like Spotify), corporate IPR in the industries of e.g. finance, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications etc.  are not as easily replaced by writing a new song. I am not at all supporting copyright infringement (!), but ever since the tape recorder made its way into households, kids have recorded from radio and records and copied among friends. What’s new is the volume of the copying that has been enabled by the digitization. Also, many artists these days consider the distribution of their content as marketing for their live appearances. Clearly we have not seen the end of content copyright models in the media industry yet.

However, let’s go back to BYOD and corporate IPR. I’d be the first to admit that if I were ever again hired by a large corporation, I’d require a BYOD environment into which my smartphone and my laptop were given access. On top of this I would obviously require offline sync of the documents I have access to, so that I can work e.g. on airplanes and in other non-online environments. Add to that a couple of thousands of other “me’s” in the same company and the entire IPR the company possesses is constantly on the move outside the company’s firewalls and protected premises. So is this a new situation? Not at all, it is just different.

At the very first appearance of laptops in business, IPR started to walk out of the door in terms of e-mail attachments. It has continued to do so ever since. Outlook and other mail clients all download attachments and store them locally on my laptop. With the mail habit of most organizations to cc every thinkable individual in each project you participate in, the consequence is obvious. How many laptop hard drives are truly encrypted these days…?

As I said in the introduction above, it makes me contemplate….

At what level are we to protect content going forward? How do I make sure that those, and only those, that I intend to see/hear my content do so? Can we really let this old problem stop us from using new technology just because the risks just appear to be more obvious? I cannot come to any other conclusion than that each content element (document, song, image etc.) must be protected on element level as any sort of “batch model” immediately will open up for abuse at some level.

So, how should we craft the “access right architecture” to meet this gigantic challenge? Well, the article ends with “Corporate IT bosses are right to fear being overwhelmed. But cleaving to their old tasks and letting others take on the new unsupervised is not an option. Forrester calls this a “titanic mistake”. The IT department is not about to die, even if many functions ascend to the cloud. However, those of its chiefs who cannot adapt may fade away.”

The text above is hence just some food for thought for IT bosses who strive to adapt. In this case I would not even dream of yet trying to come up with an answer, at least not in a public forum like this :) .

As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts about my perspective! Please comment below!