In yesterday's post I introduced the idea of leveraging content security as a way to simultaneously build a corporate knowledge base or DNA. The post ended with required functionality, among this the need to authenticate content. Allow me to elucidate. The ability and need to authenticate content is today more important than ever. Why, because the web, blogs and wikis have enabled an era in which "everyone is a publisher/ everyone is an authority." This really is Andy Warhol on steroids: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Well the future is here, and that 15 minutes can be for as long as someone wants to keep publishing. Powerful yes, an enabler of collaboration and social network analysis. But, in such a world we must be more careful than ever to validate our sources.
There are at least three basic scenarios in which validation is critical.
The openness of the internet requires that we validate the source. While I have always been inline with this philosophy, I did not understand the gravity of the issue until 2 years ago when I had the opportunity to work with a group of federal librarians. Jan Herd, a research librarian with the Library of Congress (which offers a great interactive site) demonstrated the criticality of the point I was making. She performed a Google search on "Martin Luther King", a popular query given the timeframe (it was the week following Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.) As you would expect, hundreds of sites were retrieved. Jan opened the site listed at the top. It looked credible enough. Using a series of tools and techniques at which she is a master, she was able to trace back the original ownership of the content to a white supremacy group. Yikes. Perhaps not the most credible source on the subject.
Within blogs and wikis it is equally important to know where content is coming form. At the Enterprise 2.0 event I attended in Boston several weeks ago, the issue of trust was raised more than once. How does one know they can rely on the content? This is why I have never been a fan of anonymous postings to a blog or wiki. Is the source credible? Does the opinion belong to someone for whom you have respect and confidence?
Lastly, general business e-documents, (e.g. web files, Word files, PDF files, e-mails, etc.) need to be authenticated as well. In yesterday's blog I spoke of a television show in which research was performed on an antique documents. The legitimacy of the document (i.e. did Thomas Jefferson actually sign it, and was the signature placed at the time he was President?) had to be validated in order to establish legitimacy (and in this case cash value) to the document. In the digital age validation and authentication are paramount. Too many techniques are available to alter so called original content, including false endorsements and back/post dating. Good records management policy can help in these cases, but the tools applied to validation and authentication have to be as versatile and powerful as the authoring/editing tools of today. Business e-records must be able to prove authenticity, even at various points in time (e.g. the electronic version of did Thomas Jefferson really "sign" this, at what time was his signature applied and has the content of the document in any way been modified since his signature). Because there is the capability to alter electronic files and time stamps, the approach used must be beyond repudiation in order to be admissible and reliable. The case law regarding this is mounting (among the best most recent examples is Lorraine v. Markel Am.Ins. Co.) Establishing content security that goes beyond repudiation is quickly becoming a requirement for any comprehensive corporate strategy, and as such is a topic that will receive ample coverage in The AIIM Market IQ on Content Security, scheduled for publication in October.
