Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

LEGAL CONCERNS

Especially in recent years, with the growth of stored data and information, legal concerns around information sharing have grown as well. The right information in the right hands can have tremendous power—but the right information in the wrong hands can be equally powerful, and dangerous. As it becomes easier to get access to information, it also becomes more likely that those wanting to harm will find ways to get to the valuable information they want to exploit. It used to be that to steal trade secrets from an organization, you had to get hold of a piece of paper and maybe copy it (to ensure the theft was not noticed); but with digitization, you could now take millions of those pieces on a tiny little memory stick and walk out the door with it undetected. While there are special tracking systems available that can record that someone accessed particular data (people reviewing the logs were able to sense something malicious), such a theft would likely stay unnoticed, at least long enough for a person to do serious damage.

One way to make those incidents less likely is with some security processes including special passwords, encryption, and special access to certain buildings, computer rooms, and files. Very often the failing element in this security chain is not the technology; rather, a person authorized to access the data who, at some point, ceases to be loyal and takes advantage for personal benefit.

One recent example allowed the German government to buy a ...