Enterprise KM - Obsession With Sanitization

Over the past couple of years that I have been involved in KM and Collaboration, one the problems I see consistently is the obsession with "sanitizing" content that goes into the KM system. This sanitization usually involves removing confidential information, client names in some cases,project estimates etc., - essentially stuff that cannot or should NOT be shared. While I acknowledge that this is a need in many industries where security and compliance are key, there is a risk of this need becoming an obsession. When this happens, so called "Knowledge champions" and content managers in the company spend 80% of their time in ensuring that 20% of the content that should not be shared doesn't get to the system. "Knowledge champions" ought to be community builders and evangelists for a bigger cause - connecting people to drive conversations and getting stuff that matters into the system. Which leads us to the question as to who should be sanitizing content? My gut feeling is that this should either be the individual who is uploading this document into the system who is responsible enough or trained to understand this or some kind of a back office - It cannot be the knowledge champion in the organization. Liberate them to do better things - to create connections, foster conversations and drive change.

Comments

[Krish Ashok]

Dinesh,Not sure if a back office will work here. Most organizations today cannot afford to have in-house backoffices in the first place, and outsourcing this is simply not an option given the IPR and security issues involved. I think there is also some scope for the platform itself to do a basic level of sanitization. For instance, it should be possible to auto-scan document contents for "sensitive" keywords and flag it for further review. Perhaps a knowledge champion can then step in give the document a detailed going-over.

[hariharan]

Large enterprises like Rogers have content scanning systems,which detects the harmfulness in the content, and remove thereby. This will be a better step, instead of maintaining box office.