Locking away information in companies
I'd thought I'd publish another of my briefing notes I've sent to clients, in this case, about the popular (but in my opinion, mostly harmful) desire to 'lock down' access on corporate wiki to other employees.
"It's a really tough one - classic thin end of the wedge scenario - as soon as you (inadvertently) 'socialise' the fact that you can, in fact, lock down spaces/pages in the wiki, you poison the well of openness for the wiki community at large.
The problem is, in my experience, that there's c. 5% (FBFR) [1] of information in a company that truly is secret. Lots of employees feel, proudly that their stuff should be protected too.
And over time, the wiki evolves into a set of silo'd information, that prevents the emergent serendipity of information flow and connection that we think we can help you leverage, say in 6 months time [2].
If there's one thing most companies don't need, is another set of information silos. Just ask the US Department of Defense (sic) - their Intellipedia wiki is an interesting case study for openness of information behind the firewall.
In other clients we've advocated a 'hybrid' approach - exactly like you've got in your wiki space - i.e. it's not the existence of the report/data/file/whatever that is private, but the object itself.
The binary nature of this approach means that it's really easy to socialise, and defend, as you don't end up in a "but they've got secure spaces, why can't we?" conversations.
A good comparative model is (another client) - they have multi-country, massive user and content wiki based on complete (employee only) access.
The open nature of their wiki means that people from across the org chart have connected and collaborated where they had never met or previously known each other.
They also have other wikis where everyone is given locking rights.
Guess which one the CEO gets to hear about on 'Innovation Showcase' days :-)"
[1] Fictitious But Feels Right
2 I've got some nice anecdotal examples of this, that we've facilitated with some decent 'framing' of the software..
