This week in links - week 40, 2008

"Gartner Dispels Common Myths, Misconceptions and Paranoias about Information Security" from Gartner.com:

“Increasing business demand for flexible security services, coupled with an already limited security budget, means that organizations can only afford to focus their resources on real issues,” said Eric Ouellet, research vice president at Gartner. “This means the security department must become adept at identifying the real threats to ensure that security becomes an enabler for business innovation, rather than an inhibitor.”

According to Gartner, security must be viewed as the ‘environmental or hazmat suit’ for the business. Security should be seen as a tool that can be used to accept risks so that the business can take advantage of market opportunities it was never able to before.

"Why the big fuss over microblogs?" by Gil Yehuda, The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals:

...why the appeal? Why the fuss? I believe two factors are at play:

• Mobility makes us omnipresent, but short on time. Microblogging appeals to those who use mobile devices. It provides a channel that honors our thumbs and encourages us to say just a few words. And we can connect to the intranet from anywhere. For some, this is true power.
  
  
• The list of people I “follow” may be interesting to you. Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information. In the case of the microblog: my “follow –list” may be more interesting to you than my micro-posts.

As enterprises become more mobile, when we break out of the cube farms and conduct our primary work from our mobile devices, then we’ll see more miniaturization of communications. I expect enterprise microblogging to serve as a place where mobile workers check in. Maybe a few conversations take off, but then employees will revert to email the moment the conversation becomes something not sharable with everyone. And we’ll need some good filtering tools to help us organize and manage microblog streams.

The more interesting behavior emerges when network-graphing tools surf through the people whom you follow and identify the influential people they follow. This is where human context makes information more valuable.

"Building a Better (and Useful) Corporate Intranet Starts With a Wiki" By C.G. Lynch, CIO:

A marketing firm used a wiki to build a new corporate intranet full of user generated content, making it more helpful than a run-of-the-mill phonebook directory. The reason for their success? They picked a wiki with a simple interface that keeps barriers to entry for users as low as possible.

"We're adding not only products, but we were growing in people and the knowledge they bring," says Schultz, the company's VP of technology. "We needed a way to put all this knowledge in one location...//...We needed something that was not only for the employees, but by the employees."