by Bill Ives
February 12, 2007 at 12:52 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Jim McGee raised some great points with his post, Auditors and Enterprise 2.0 technologies. I have also encountered this specially when talking to a whole firm of auditors. I certainly agree with all his counter points, especially his close, “By making the thinking and the debate visible and organized, you blunt, if not disarm, those who would try to portray the debate as something other than what it was.”
I would add that working in a transparent common space makes any potential bad behavior more visible, trackable, and even controllable. The fear is not how web 2.0 tools and approaches will be misused. While they can be misused it is much less likely than the siloed tools. The fear is rather how people will misuse the old style siloed tools like email and IM (or even telephone) to inappropriately convey what goes on in the common public space by taking it out of public view. With email you lose control once it is sent out. With a blog or wiki it remains visible. The auditors should love the web 2.0 tools because you can more easily audit them.
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The perception that entries or comments in a blog remains visible which increases transparency and auditability is not necessarily true.
Many bloggers regularly delete or edit blog entries once they have been published, effectively rewriting history or deleting or rejecting the comments of others which alter the context if not the content of their blog.
This is also possible in a wiki. In fact the several hundred volunteers for Wikipedia.org regularly do this on a daily basis to weed out bias and defacements.
Why this also happens with sent emails.
So much for the effectiveness of audit trails, record retention legislation and the rules of evidence.
Good point. However, while the owner of the blog can erase an inappropriate comment, they cannot retrieve an inappropriate email. However the inappropriate blog post is then gone (unless of course someone copied it into another format while it was open). A email can quickly spin out of control as it is forwarded on and on. With most wikis old versions are saved and can be retrieved. This is how the wikipedia people go back to get the good content that was defaced by spam. IBM has an intersting tool that lets you analyse the history of a wiki entry as it goes through multiple edits. There is no perfect solution but there is much more transparency AND control with a blog or wiki than with email.
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ZiaFebruary 14th, 2007 at 11:24 am |
Agree with Bill. Transparency and disclosure (selective disclosure) are the key tenets to a successful regulatory program. I suspect that the MiFID banking regulations in Europe will provide the impetus for a variety of Enterprise 2.0 tools to take hold in banks.
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