Technology isn’t the answer
Sometimes I wonder about our industry. We seem so keen to promote silver bullets and technology solutions to what are at heart human problems. This blog post by an excellent technologist at Oracle rather illustrates the problem for me.
The British security services, rather embarrasingly, hired a spook who turned out to be guided by voices in his head. He set about obtaining information on how the security services work and tried to sell it to the Dutch.
The parting shot from the blog
Of course this story could have been very different if those documents had been protected with an information rights management solution like Oracle’s. Oracle IRM is a perfect technology to allowing national security agencies to protect their most valuable data
Of course the story would have been different. He’d have used non-technological techniques. Or different technological techniques. IRM is a very clever and very useful technology, but when your problem is essentially a human resources one – “How on earth did we get the recruitment so wrong” – then encrypting documents is hardly going to change the fundamental problem. Sadly it may, and likely will, lead people to have over-confidence in their security.
I get tired of this too! Databases, software, computers, technology – all just tools to help “business” (read: “people”) challenges. Related… for us normal business folk, it makes a big difference when you can keep your eye on the thing that gives your job a reason to exist in the first place.
Jeremy
16 Jul 10 at 2:25 pm