WikiLeaks, Expectations and ECM Big Men On Content.

The soul of consulting is oversimplification. Making big scary problems appear so simple in their solution that decision makers will commit to taking on solving them. Hopefully with your services. Pondering the WikiLeaks fiasco it seems to me this is a classic opportunity for enterprise content management consulting and a case where requirements and expectations failed to meet.

What really happened in the leak? In simplest terms, a person made a copy of content from an environment and gave thecopy to someone that should not have had it. Simple right? This is a very basic problem addressed or at least acknowledged by most ECM software. Every ECM product evaluated in the recently updated GartnerECM Magic Quadrant provides access control,versioning and records management.

Many ECM vendors offeraudit and reporting that could alert onaccess and provide search and analytics on the content.The best ones provideadvanced security features like encryption at rest and in the transport layer. And don’t forget digital shredding at the storage level for content no longer needed.

None of these solutions to what in retrospect were obvious problems seemed to be in place inCablegate. To be fair, there is next to nothing that can prevent a breach by a resourceful and vindictive inside man with access but at the very least they would have limited the damage.

So why were these features not present. Simple. The requirement for the system containing these cables was not to manage content. It was to facilitate communication.

Continues @http://bigmenoncontent.com/2010/12/06/wikileaks-expectations-and-ecm/