Secure collaboration: the end of gatekeeping.

• Author: Ruck, Joe
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT

THERE HAVE BEEN many times in the recent past that technology breakthroughs have triggered organizational and societal transformation. Web access and email were the powerhouses of the last decade and have engrained themselves into our day-to-day life. More recently, Twitter with its counterintuitive 140-character limit is making a strong case for enduring impact. Now social media and Web 2.0 collaboration tools are showing signs of such a promise at the enterprise level. It is worthwhile then to ask what enterprise norms will now change as a result of the growing impact of social media. The most significant may be one I have personally witnessed--the end of gatekeeping.

Balancing access with privacy

All companies have information repositories, such as customer databases, product catalogs, and engineering plans. Employees across the enterprise need routine access to their content, sometimes on an ad-hoc basis, but that access cannot be completely unfettered because of confidentiality and security restrictions. Valuable IP, personnel data, and strategic plans should not be left unprotected. Access control is typically entrusted to an individual, who acts as the go-to person to gain access for any one piece of information--the gatekeepers.

Balancing the relative merits of privacy and openness is not black and white, so often companies will opt for the low-risk approach, which is simply to lock down access and give discretionary control to the gatekeeper. Not surprisingly then, gatekeepers often err on the side of caution and are perceived as bottlenecks as they refuse or slow-roll legitimate requests for access. Management is often asked to clear the request, which is of course grossly inefficient.

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Example: sales contracts

One example is access to contracts by sales teams. In most organizations, contract repositories are kept within Legal. When renegotiating an agreement, account managers will typically require access to the customer contract history to understand precedent and set expectations. But often sales reps are not authorized to directly ask Legal for a contract. This is despite the fact that the individual who has to make the request was the very same person who negotiated the original contract. Instead they need management to ask on their...