May 12, 2009 at 10:17 am · Filed under
Messy World
Industry research group AIIM just released the results of a study that warned that “a third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery and 40% might need to search back-up tapes to find emails that could be relevant to litigation.”
The new 2009 AIIM survey found that 84% would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted.
“In AIIM’s view, most organizations are only just waking up to the fact that among the deluge of day-to-day emails, are some that constitute important business records. These emails need to be recorded and retained as such.”
The reason I bring this up here is that there is no difference between email communications and social-network communications, covering blogs, wikis and other postings. It’s all electronic communications posted on behalf of organizations to conduct organizational business. Social network interactions are business records, too.
The question is, how soon before legal departments start getting the jitters over electronic communications beyond email?
There are also the accompanying management issues that also go with the storage and retrievability of electronic communications. Someone has to be in charge of discovering, storing and archiving these communications. Hardware needs to be made available, and managed.
The AIIM study observes that more than half of the respondents lack confidence “that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete and recoverable… Only 19% have the facility to move important emails into a document or records management system, or a dedicated email management system.”
This, of course, is a nod to the study’s underwriters, but the findings also give pause to companies with intense and pervasive social networking activities. Can they retrieve discussions and communications from six, 12 , 24 months ago? What if important communications took place on an outside service such as Twitter?
Who’s in charge of all this information? And do they have the resources to manage, store, and archive it?
As social media has grown within and outside of enterprises, the question of legal and regulatory liabilities for content has remained in the background. However, we may start seeing more policing by regulators and intrusion by legal departments.
According to a new report in the Financial Times, “revised guidelines on endorsements and testimonials by the Federal Trade Commission, now under review and expected to be adopted, would hold companies liable for untruthful statements made by bloggers and users of social networking sites who receive samples of their products. The guidelines would also hold bloggers liable for the statements they make about products.”
A counter-argument by Richard O’Brien, vice-president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, said it was premature to regulate blogs or other forms of new media. According to FT, O’Brien rote to the FTC that “regulating these developing media too soon may have a chilling effect on blogs and other forms of viral marketing, as bloggers and other viral marketers will be discouraged from publishing content for fear of being held liable for any potentially misleading claim.”
Over the past decade or so, the legal system caught up to email, which must now be managed and is treated as any other corporate record or statement. That is, companies are liable for the statements made by company representatives within email communications. Even more recently, instant messaging has fallen under the same scrutiny. Both email and IM, in fact, are construed as electronic communication. In fact, the United Nations Commission on International Trade (UNICTRAL) Model Law on Electronic Commerce — which serves as the basis for many national laws — defines a “data message” as “information generated, sent, received, or stored by electronic, optical, or similar means including, but not limited to, electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic mail, telegram, telex, or telecopy.”
The UNICTRAL definition was drafted earlier in the decade, but certainly can be extended to social media. How liable will organizations be for any and all statements made by employees or representatives in blogs or social media sites? That is a question that inevitably will be hashed out — and hopefully, we can keep the lawyers from quashing the potential of the social media sphere.
In fact, a survey out of the University of Southern California last year found almost of half of organizations may be holding back on social media inittaives due to liability and legal concerns.
Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist / analyst at Forrester whom many know as an energetic voice in the area of Enterprise 2.0, points to a new initiative (Change.Force.com – A Citizen’s Briefing Book) by the Obama administration. In the first few paragraphs of his analysis, he states that in his exchanges with executives he is experiencing more openness to the use of social technologies, and hence of some greater degree of transparency with customers, employees and other stakeholders.
A Wisdom of Crowds tactic being adopted by the new administration … interesting idea, we’ll see how it plays out.
I just learned from Leverage’s Mike Walsh that Obama will receive a briefing from the top voted ideas that were submitted by the American people each evening see Change.Force.com (a play off) . This method of keeping in direct communication by ‘listening’ to the citizens leans on voting style technology similar to Dell’s Ideastorm. My colleague Josh Bernoff will be pleased, as he requested this feature a few months ago.
You’ll need to login and register (I suspect they can use IP addresses to determine point of origin within US) in order to confirm location but that’s not completely accurate. How can Obama extend this further? Make a similar site for all other nations to submit ideas for foreign policy. This doesn’t come without challenges of course, the system could be gamed, and there’s no promise he’ll make changes based on our feedback, we’ll see.
I talk to the executives of the world’s largest brands, after Obama won the election, I get a lot less push back –it’s rare I have to have discussions now about the validity of social technologies.
Of course, social technologies still come with risk, but for some reason this feels really good, we’re all a bit more connected and the internet helps to bring us together.
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I’m not surprised. if I were the leader of an organisation, I would just get on with it, as it seems clear to me that the permanent and ubiquitous presence of the Web in our lives is creating what is effectively a new sociology of expectation, namely of at least having a voice and to some degree being "heard" by hierarchical leaders in our societies’ institutions.
The success of on-demand, Software as a Service, or Cloud computing has raised expectations beyond the point where enterprises and vendors can deliver, a new study concludes.
A new study from Saugatuck Technology states that users want SaaS throughout the enterprise, whether their enterprises are ready for it or not. And, by extension, SaaS is spreading throughout the enterprise, whether the vendors – or their offerings – are ready to support and deliver what users want.
The study, based on interviews with 400 executives and 30 SaaS solution provider and independent software vendors, finds that while users are increasingly demanding and expecting SaaS versions of everything from email to ERP, they often don’t understand the technological and organizational resource constraints to enterprise-wide SaaS.
Blame the vendors, who are scrambling to catch up with demand coming from within enterprises, according to Mike West, Saugatuck research vide president and leader of the SaaS study. “Unfortunately, not enough SaaS providers see or understand the increasing enterprise scope of user demands and desires. Over time they will face some real challenges when it comes to maintaining high user satisfaction and, ultimately, high rates of renewal or expansion of their services.”
Saugatuck identified four waves of SaaS evolution. While earlier-generation “Wave I” offerings continue to flourish, the broader market has moved on to “Wave II” solutions that integrate with on-premise data and processes.
Some providers are beginning to address key “Wave III” requirements, which support inter- and intra-company collaboration and personalized workflows.
Longer-term, “Wave IV” threatens to sweep IT and business together and forward beyond user and vendor experience. Continuous growth and innovation are core competitive requirements in most SaaS markets -addressing an ever-expanding array of customer and partner desires and requirements for interfaces and function.
The on-demand, cloud model of computing is poised to sweep enterprises — even those using traditional ons-ite software, Saugatuck predicts. With traditional on-premise license revenues stalling, ISVs will adopt SaaS strategies en masse, led by either internal development initiatives, acquisition of synergistic SaaS assets or via virtualization.
But there is no guarantee that many ISVs can and will make successful transitions to SaaS, Saugatuck adds. When asked to identify who the “SaaS Master Brands” of the future are likely to be, 51 percent of users chose either pure-play SaaS solution providers or said that “it was just too early to tell.”
As an enabler of Cloud-based software development, deployment, integration, and management, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will significantly improve the enterprise-ready capabilities of most SaaS offerings. PaaS therefore becomes a key enabler of enterprise-ready SaaS, and of SaaS-ready enterprises.
Saugatuck predicts that “Cloud Computing” will evolve into “Cloud Business” — a natural progression of SaaS, the IT utility concept, and business process outsourcing and transformation.
It’s ironic isn’t it, that at a time when the problems that confront us, such as the end of cheap oil, a war that we cannot get out of, an education system that fails 40% of Americans, a healthcare system that serves only a few, that our news is so awful.
CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.
News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.
How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?
I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.
Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience – how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.
This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.
The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.
What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
FASTforward Blog Guide to Twitter
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
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Highlights of the discussion, which touched on issues of transparency, collaboration, risk management and more, are available here.
FASTforward 08 Video Coverage
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This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
