My ongoing obsession with the critical need for the corporate world to increase people awareness/foreknowledge organization wide, in addition to the deployment of cutting edge technology, was strengthened by the recent ITBusiness.ca poll in which 790 readers voted in response to the following question in the context of the recent Winners/CIBC information loss scandal:

Do you think companies are doing enough to protect customer data from security breaches?

Yes. Nothing can be a 100 per cent secure and companies are doing their best given limited resources. 9%

No. The recent security lapses at CIBC and TJX’s Winners and HomeSense are a prime example of the way companies are failing to protect data. 91%

Clearly an overwhelming majority consider regulation, technology, and ultimately management decision-making, to be the final solution.

Ask yourself:    

·          What in life is absolutely certain?

·          Can evolving/imperfect technology, regulatory bodies or isolated management circles alone keep ahead of/pace with those unable to resist the challenge of hacking into state of the art technology?

·          Is technology, at best, able only to deal with known hacking techniques? Technology can only counter new challenges to security after they have happened?

·          Will the human factor, by nature imperfect and vulnerable, ever be dispensed with? Conversely would it not be true that humans are better able to better factor nuance, instinct and possibility into strategic equations than technology?

·          If creative hackers are human, therefore able to work with the unproven, surely an alert and creatively thinking team might be in an equally strong position to think about what threats might occur?

Consider:

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

·          It is impossible to know simultaneously both momentum (mass x velocity) and the position of a particle

·          Therefore it follows that we cannot talk about electrons circling the nucleus in well-defined orbits

What then is certain? All particles move all the time.

Would not this principle lend support to the fact that technology alone will always be imperfect?

Would not general organizational awareness increase vigilance and contribute to countering, on a balance of best probability, what might happen in the future?  

People Awareness + Clues/Events + Technology (Knowledge Management)= Intelligence Theory + Strategy/Planning = Policy + Technology (CRM) = Effective Risk Management/Competitive Edge


Rodger Harding, Toronto