Retaining Content Control

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Does the term "enterprise digital rights management" come up often in meetings with business-side executives? If not, consider yourself lucky. The long phrase full of big words aims to keep company documents under control. Yes, securely manage your intellectual property, at least the documented parts. Yes, hide embarrassing mistakes, as up to three quarters of all documents labeled as Top Secret by the US Government do, according to some researchers.

How do you manage your standard document files and e-mail today? Do you know when those files leave the building?

The folks at SealedMedia (.com) just released a study saying 76 percent of CIOs "are seeking additional content protection and control functionality." Since SealedMedia sells exactly such products, we expect their study to support their position. But some of the numbers are worth examining.

Only 45 percent of employees use their existing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, meaning 55 percent of employees do nothing about tracking content. Half of all employees store "sensitive information," whatever that means in surveyed companies, outside the official ECM repository. 43 percent of sensitive information is never targeted for official ECM storage. This makes me think "sensitive" is handled about as rigorously as the fed's Top Secret tag.

If your business VPs tag documents as "sensitive" but don't authorize storage inside officially controlled areas, they are wasting your time. But if documents are tagged as sensitive, you must persuade users to store them in the proper repositories. You must also backup those storage areas under ECM control, or at least encrypt the backups. But you already encrypt backups that might possibly get out of the building, right?

The data point that struck me as most bizarre was the number of executives who wanted to "protect intellectual property when outsourcing or offshoring." Some say the ability to hold contradictory thoughts in your mind concurrently indicates advanced cognitive skills. In some cases, however, it just means your business line VPs don't realize they are issuing contradictory commands: send all your data overseas to outsourcers, but don't let the outsourcers read the data. How do these people keep getting promoted?

A lesser but still significant majority of surveyed CIOs want some way to "protect board and executive communications." That sounds like the typical all-American executive activity of hiding excessive compensation awards doesn't it?