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By Karen Lawrence Oqvist
 Today
more than ever before, the essence of any organisation is driven and
motivated by relationships between people within and outside of the
organisation. These relationships can be used to elicit ‘soft
information' when conducting market intelligence activities, as
Vernon Prior said in his recent FUMSI articles: 'Organisations
comprise many people (the ultimate sources of soft information), both
inside and outside the company.' (http://web.fumsi.com/go/af/4156).
This is nothing new, except when we map this into the context of the
globalised connected information society that we are all part of
today. It provides new avenues to elicit ‘soft information' and
map it into a context that gives the ‘soft information' a hard
value.
If
we were to postulate on the role of the informal organization as
opposed to the formal, the following quote from Price is apt: 'An
organization is both a formal and informal entity. The formal aspect
of an organization is its official structure and public image visible
in organization charts and annual reports. The informal organization
is a more elusive concept, describing the complex network of
psychological and social relationships between its people. The
informal organization is an unrecognized world of cliques and
politics, friendships and enmities, gossip and affairs.'[i]
Hang on to this
picture and map it into the concept of Web 2.0, taking a bottom up
approach. Remember Web 1.0 is about mapping the physical world to the
virtual world and Web 2.0 is about people[ii].
Hence it is an informal organisation that is driven by your
employees, each constituting a jigsaw piece of the social capital of
your organisation. Imagine a motivated knowledge workforce, driven by
their own personal agenda; which is to get an online reputation and
be heard in one or more of the small ponds in the large ocean of your
organisation[iii].
But
what happens if your organisation is not aware of this, is not part
of this, and does not have an internal intelligence infrastructure to
facilitate the capture and effective use of soft information being
generated by your employees? What happens if your employees don't
feel that they are being listened to or that their opinion counts?
Figure 1
Information flow dynamics
matrix
The
consequences could be that your organisation's soft (and maybe also
hard) information flows transparently through the organisational
boundaries. The information flow dynamics of an organisation could
look a little like as is shown in Figure 1; the red arrows are
information flow. What is in the red box is an interesting cocktail
that is a mixture of rumour, suggestion, opinion, gossip, hints and
speculation generated by the employee; that may or may not be true.
Your employees, many of them subject matter experts in the masses,
will instead congregate, group and link with other subject matter
experts from other organisations in virtual spaces somewhere in
cyberspace where they can be heard and where their opinion counts.
Here they will build their online reputation by communicating,
linking and collaborating outside of the confines of the
organization. What's more, this is a great feeding hole for market
intelligence personnel from other organisations.
If
this is the case, it is probable that you have no way of knowing of
who is linking with whom and you will not know what your employees
are sharing. You may think that you do; after all you have an
information security programme implemented to protect the
organisation's IP and any hard/soft information generated by the
organisation, as well as hard information generated by employees. You
even have all employees sign to a code of business ethics (COBE).
However what you are probably missing is the protection of soft
information generated by the employee, based upon what they have
gleaned given their role in the organisation, and what has been
shared with them by the organisation; information that is absorbed,
shaken up and blended with that person's subjective self.
Figure
2 Information leakage and influence by internal intelligence
Much
soft information has no significant value by itself, but once linked
with previously unlinked soft information they transform into nuggets
of gold for persons/organisations mining for market intelligence, or
for head-hunters digging for key influencers in targeted
organisations. It may give them enough to ask the right questions
with contact with the right person, altogether easier today with the
public availability of professional networking tools that can assist
them in building their knowledge map.
Indeed,
to control employee soft information that is shared outside of the
organisation's boundaries is next to impossible if you don't know
what is being shared. What you can do is empower the employee to
share within the organisation in a way that makes them feel that they
count, that the organisation listens to them, and you can also have
an infrastructure in place that enables you to understand better your
informal organisation. This information can be used for internal
business intelligence as a feedback loop as shown in Figure 2.
This
does not enable you to protect the privacy of organisational data
that seeps through unofficial channels, but it will at least give you
an idea of what soft information is being shared, who is talking to
whom, who the key influencers of opinion in your organisation are. It
may enable you to be proactive in influencing how hard/soft
information is interpreted by the employee before it is leaked
outside of the organisation's physical/logical boundaries.
Just
expand this concept. Information could also be flowing into your
organisation via informal channels. Your employees could be the
receivers. If leveraged correctly they provide additional sources for
market intelligence for what's going on outside of the
organisation. Information that they have gleaned and interpreted and
has become a part of the employee's soft information. Add this to
hard information gained from projects and work done on customer
sites, results in a lot of market intelligence that should be flowing
back into the soft/hard information of the organisation.
Figure
3 Empowerment of the employee journey
Take
a look at Figure 3, 'Empowerment of the employee journey'. If you
were to map your organisation onto this journey, it probably has
newsgroups and forums, there are virtual rooms for learning, email,
chat and maybe even an internal ‘blogging' space. Notice that
your ability to influence the content of employees' soft capital
should increase naturally by providing the organisation's employees
with participative tools. Internal business intelligence can benefit
by leveraging special tools that log factors such as activity,
linking, new groups, forum activity, blogs most visited, knowledge
capital uploaded, downloaded, etc., to provide a picture of the
informal organisation.
How
does this work in practice? Before we get to the soft information,
you should consider implementing a technology that can help you to
control the proliferation of hard information scattered throughout
your organisation. This might be confidential information, or
segments of intellectual property (IP) cut and paste into documents
or emails that have become a part of the employees' hard
information. One such product uses document fingerprinting
techniques, and using this blueprint, scans the organisation's
information infrastructure for fragments. You could start by asking
Symantec about their DLP (data loss/leakage prevention) products.
Next,
you need to have a social networking infrastructure implemented in
your organisation, and there are loads of products out there doing
this. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has features such as
knowledge management, wikis, discussion forums, surveys, contacts,
links, etc. Moreover, if we were to build upon this with business
intelligence tools, there is at least one product from OISoftware
that enables you to build a picture of your informal organisation.
This product includes a ‘reputation spider' that provides the
ability to measure the worth of social capital that an individual
employee is worth to the organisation, i.e. who are your main
influencers of opinion and rumour?
The
tools are out there., It is just a matter of understanding how best
to leverage them within your organisation. Management needs to
appreciate the power of surfacing the informal organisation not to
control but to leverage its organic nature, a key strength in the
chaotic, connected world that we are operating in today. Business
intelligence should not be focused purely upon what's going on
outside of your organisation, much of which is outside of your
control, but upon what is happening inside of the organisation's
own walls.
[i]
Price, A (2004) Organizational culture. In:
Human Resource Management in a Business Context, 2nd
ed. Thomson Learning, Chapter 9.
[ii]
Lawrence Öqvist, K. (2009), Virtual Shadows: Your Privacy in the
Information Society, ISBN 978-1-906124-09-0, British
Computer Society
[iii]
Lawrence Öqvist, K. (2009), Talk Differently. BCS
IT Now,
May 2009.
Virtual
Shadows - Karen's privacy blog
By Karen Lawrence Oqvist
During
the past 20 years Karen Lawrence Öqvist's experience in IT and
information security has spanned diverse verticals and many
countries. Today she works with Hewlett-Packard as a senior security
architect as well as program manager for HP's Information Security
Service Management (ISSM).
She
has a Masters Degree in Information Security from the Royal Holloway
University of London and is studying for an MBA with Henley
Management School, University of Reading.
Karen
is a published author on the subject of identity, privacy and
information sharing and hosts a blog at ww.virtualshadows.com. Her
book "Virtual Shadows" was published by the British
Informatics Society (BCS) in January 2009. She is a frequent speaker
at conferences in Europe both on the subject of identity and privacy,
and information security management.
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