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October 27, 2003
If You're Going to be Naked, You'd Better Be Buff
Regular readers will know that transparency is a favorite topic of mine. One of the chief benefits of eGovernment is transparent access to information about what government does. In an IT organization, transparency makes happy customers: there's no place inside a healthy organization for hiding information about rates, project status, or operational metrics. IT customers should have ready access to all that information. Now, Don Tapscott and David Ticoll have written a book which deals with transparency in the larger organization called The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business. The book was the subject of a recent article in CIO Insight. Here are a few highlights:
Tapscott says that "its staggering to think that companies, when it comes to disclosure of various classes of information, pretty much just wing it. Few have a strategy for figuring out what should be disclosed and under what conditions." He offers some specific advice for companies in an increasingly transparent business climate:
- Abide by basic values in all operations. Tell the truth, abide by commitments, consider the interest of all stakeholders, be candid about shortcomings and challenges. Make sure that business integrity drives every aspect of company operations.
- Deliver the right value to each group of stakeholders.
- Understand the promise and peril of transparency and manage it continuously. Don't just try to spin and execute PR strategies when a problem occurs. Develop a proactive approach to communicating the values of the company in the face of challenges.
The article has a section entitled "Blogs and Martyrs" but it doesn't deal extensively with the idea of weblogs other than to mention that "stakeholder webs" can use them to bring public scrutiny to bear. I'd have liked to see more about how employee blogs can be a human voice for the company and provide positive results through transparency. In general, as you'd expect from the quote I give above, the tone is defensive: how to protect yourself from too much unwanted disclosure rather than proactive. Maybe the book is different.
One of the things I've been contemplating is how the intersection of several recent trends drives the move to corporate transparency. Here's the argument in brief:
Initiatives like Sarbanes-Oxley are requiring corporations to report more and more material information to shareholders.
Accounting data is not enough. In the past, when capital was the most important thing, accounting data rules supreme, but what about today's corporation where the quality of your technical operations or the knowledge tied up in your employees head is your competitive advantage? Does mere accounting data tell the whole picture of the company and its operations?
Right now, I get basically the same accounting information that a shareholder of Ford or GM saw in 1970. Yet, corporations are increasingly turning to digital dashboards and similar systems to provide business intelligence to managers because they know that the accounting data isn't enough. As a shareholder, I'd like to see some of that information when judging the health of a company. I'm sure that this would cause some significant angst among corporate executives, but I think that's where we're headed.
The article concludes with a discussion of the CIO's role. Just as eGovernment is about providing transparent access to government, corporate IT systems will increasingly be driven by policies and decisions regarding what information to disclose to whom. This is the essence of digital identity and is just one more example where traditional "secure perimeter" approaches to information security are becoming increasingly inadequate.
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Upgrade to Panther
This was the weekend of moves and upgrades. In addition to moving my weblog to its new server, I also got Panther, the newest version of Apple's OS X, in the mail on Friday. I waited a little while to see what the forums were saying about the upgrade process and then went ahead and installed it on my TiBook. Here's what I did:
- Backed up /Users, /Library, and /Applications, just in case. All of your user data, including address book entries, mail (if you use the Apple Mail client, at least), etc. are in your /Users/$user_name/Library folder. I backed up /Library and /Applications to preserve properties and so on in case of a disaster.
- Ran the installation, choosing the upgrade option. I was originally planning on doing an archive and install, but decided an upgrade would work as well. I usually like to do clean installs, but that seemed too much bother, especially in light of the fact that I'm traveling this week and didn't want to keep finding things I needed when I was away from home. If the upgrade doesn't work well, I'll do a clean install later.
I backed up to a SMB mounted disk over my home network by just making compressed tarballs of the directories. Even with compressions, I had about 17Gb of data to back up, so it took a while. The installation proceeded smoothly and about 45 minutes starting the installation I had an upgraded machine.
Here's my first impressions and bug reports:
- Expose ROCKS! If you haven't heard of Expose, its the new addition to the GUI that let's you see all of your windows at once. If you work with lots of open windows, as I do, you'll love how it lets you see where everything is and then let's you select which you want on top. The effect reminds me of the computer GUI in "Minority Report" a little bit. This is one of the coolest GUI innovations I've seen in a long time. I'd upgrade just for Expose.
- Mail, iCal, and the Address book seem snappier and I don't see the "wait" cursor nearly as much as I used to. I tried the new message threading feature in Mail and turned it back off. It may take some getting used to.
- Startup items are now listed under the user accounts preferences to give each user their own custom environment.
- A few things didn't work in 10.3. The two I've found so far are uControl, a utility for swapping the CAPSLOCK and Control keys, and CopyPaste-X, a utility which makes the clipboard into a stack---very handy in blogging. uControl simply doesn't work (yet) with 10.3. CopyPaste-X made my lowercase "c" key not work for some reason.
That's it for now. A painless and simple upgrade that pretty much left the rest of the machine alone. I'll write additional reports as I gain more experience.