Content Security - What's That?
As you may be aware, our Market Intelligence unit (Carl Frappaolo [see his blog - Taking AIIM] and myself [you're here already, unless you're reading a feed]) has published our first Market IQ report, earlier this month - the topic for this quarter being Content Security (full title "Content Security: At the Fulcrum of Innovation and Risk").
Nearly 60 pages, 58 figures, and quite a bit of analysis and "thought leadership" (if I do say so myself - please let me know if that is or is not the case).
Market IQ = Market Intelligence Quarterly. This is our foundational primary research and we have gotten some great feedback already on this work. Would love your feedback as well - best to kick that off by reading a copy yourself, first (it's free for end-users, so take two).
With this quarterly series, we have released research focused at a broader view than you might typically find elsewhere. So these reports will not be about speeds and feeds, market sizing, 2x2 grids, voodoo, "vendor shootouts" and feature by feature comparisons, or similar, exceedingly specific aspects of the tactics (only) of deployment, oxygen-depriving high-level "pure strategy," or low-level "bits" that would provide a step-by-step technical implementation.
Instead, we want to expose the AIIM Community (over 50,000 people) to a higher-level and more strategic view that can help business people (workers, managers, executives) have intelligent conversations with their technical staff, and in the opposite direction as well (having been on both sides, it is definitely a two-way street).
I realize you may hear that quite a bit - strategy first, it's all about business, "I.T. doesn't matter" - but in all seriousness, we are taking a more systematic and holistic view than (I believe) you typically see.
In this first publication, we explore the issues of the security of content, from cradle to grave, passing inside the firewall, out to partners and customers, including records management and e-discovery concerns, and so on. It's quite a large umbrella - but a serious, and intriguing area of the world of enterprise content.
What's the tie to the title of this entry?
One of the many ways the Market IQ series is different, is that we are unafraid to ask the questions that most people aren't even beginning to consider - the advantage of having experience in this industry (call it 35 years between Carl and I), and in seeing "content" as a serious area of concern for today's enterprises.
So, in this case, while we discuss technologies such as Enterprise Rights Management (ERM), a policy-based method to secure content (the consumer variant being DIgital Rights Management, or DRM, which is similar but different), and we clearly discuss technologies under the Content Security umbrella, we're really discussing Risk Management and the business concerns and opportunities in the world of enterprise content.
One of the (perhaps) stranger questions that we asked our 600 respondents to the survey for this Market IQ on Content Security, was:
Has Discussion of Creative Commons Licenses or Similar Concepts Impacted Your Organization's Attitudes Towards Content Security?
This could easily seem to be a truly bizarre question, coming from the world of wikis, blogs, and the "open movement" at large - how does it apply to "enterprise content" and "business value" versus academic sharing freedoms, the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 movement, and similar areas, for example?
Well, first, If you're not familiar with the idea of Creative Commons Licenses, they are a relatively new idea, established in 2001 (see the "Creative Commons" site for a very deep dive). This initiative seeks to expand and make more flexible copyright statements than "traditional" copyright laws. The Creative Commons [or CC] is the non-profit organization that organizes and promotes these "modern copyright" thoughts, which cut a line from traditional copyright to a license to fold, mutilate, spindle content of any kind - with explicit permissions.
To quote the CC homepage:
Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."
So CC specifically relates to the Market IQ on Content Security with regards to how organizations might protect outward-facing shared content.
As a former musician, I can safely say that borrowing ideas is truly how music is created - and having sampled (digitally) my fair share of content in creating various types of music (ask me about my rap tune sometime), there are pros and cons to even thinking about this gray-space of content protection.
In an enterprise or business setting - whether this initiative has merit or not is nearly moot as most survey respondents (35%) indicated they were simply not familiar with the topic. Another 27% indicated that they had no idea how it might impact their organization. 39% were familiar with the topic, and of those, only 3% looked at Creative Commons Licenses as having a positive (i.e., lessening need for security) effect within their organization. See chart below (or read the Market IQ of course) for further details.
The reason this question was asked?
Our suspicion was this - that for organizations that have looked into CC as a way to embrace modern copyright, they *might* have thought more specifically about their intellectual property (IP) at large, and on the implications as to what "rights" are literally embodied in code (such as through ERM technology, mentioned above).
For now, these survey respondents were largely unaware of CC and it's potential for positive impact on their strategy, but as Enterprise 2.0 awareness builds, we would expect that to change, perhaps not dramatically, but to steadily increase.
If any of this (all of this?) was of interest to you, I won't hit you with the link to the Market IQ again, but grab a copy, give it a read, and let me know what you think.
In addition, we are doing a dedicated webinar to discuss the findings from this Market IQ - the webinar is also free to attend, and if you prefer to participate in a webinar rather than read a paper, or simply want to explore this in more detail, we'd love to have you.
Register for the webinar, held Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 2pm ET - and either way, would love to hear your thoughts on this batch of topics. Did we hit the center of the target? Completely miss? We goofed and there IS NO TARGET (nor spoon - for you Matrix fans)?
Also, keep an eye out, the next Market IQ is focused on Enterprise 2.0 - and there's more (much more) to that world than most people think. It's not just wikis and blog folks - and contrary to the extremists in this space, "enterprise technology" at large still has quite a roll to play there.
But more on that later...
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