Apparently there’s a well-chewed bone in the enterprise architecture community about whether EA should focus on processes, practices or people.
This caveat appeared at the foot of a 2007 email from a Florida university employee:
Florida has a very broad public records law. As a result, any written communication created or received by Florida Gulf Coast University employees is subject to disclosure to the public and the media, upon request, unless otherwise exempt. Under Florida law, e-mail addresses are public records. If you do not want your email address released in response to a public records request, do not send electronic mail to this entity. Instead, contact this office by phone or in writing.
The university is clearly trying to compensate for a poor process (the public records law) by getting people to change their behavior (phone us instead of writing an email). This has the potential to become an information management problem — if business is transacted verbally, where is the authoritative record of who promised what to whom? From there, it becomes an information architecture problem — how do we know who’s called us, and can we call them back? Where do we capture information about the subject of the conversation, and who has access to that information? Is that record of a conversation in itself a ‘public’ record within the meaning of the law?
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz notes that the CIOs of many organisations are wrestling with what to do about “the invisible hand of open source – communities of individuals equally devoted to their employers, and to personal and peer productivity,” who create open-source solutions “behind the scenes, beyond management’s oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies…”
Patrick and Scott at Institutional Knowledge describe the same problem, as seen from slightly lower down the organisational hierarchy:
“There are a ton of applications being developed locally at your institution and you have no way of knowing who is doing what or how they are doing it… You can ask people for updated information over e-mail, which will get you a few well-meaning responses and a lot of crickets… The problem is that no matter how easy you make this, you are essentially asking other people to do something for you, and therein lies the rub… This is more a people problem than a technology problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.”
The Florida scenario, the invisible hand and the who’s-doing-what question are all examples of the timorous beasties that m’colleagues and I will attempt to track, wrestle and otherwise subdue over the next year or two.
Clues, ideas and mutterings of encouragement will all be gratefully accepted.
Tags: process, benchmarking, governance, open source, information audit, privacy