Unacceptable, Accidental Web Publication, Can it be Avoided?
Unacceptable, Accidental Web Publication, Can it be Avoided?
July 25th, 2007: When the Australian Labour party leaked a Word Document form with Track Changes enabled, it sent virtual shivers down the spines of Internet public relations spinsters everywhere.
Whilst the major leak happened under the Mark Latham lead Labour party all the way back in 2004, it was an event which was severely troubling to anyone who releases documents to the public. “These are career limiting events” Lyndon Sharp, Manager of Information services in the Officer of the Board of Studies said at the KM conference in Sydney yesterday.
One of the major pitfalls of content management is the assumption that adding more people who are responsible for signing off on a document means it is more secure. The basis of this is grounded in the age old principle of management, add more layers of it. Unfortunately for a lot of Australian business managers, this does not necessarily mean a document has been checked by more sources. Quite often managers would sign documents simply because someone else has signed before them “When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible” Sharp said.
Quite often businesses are running into what Sharp calls the “Too Much, Too Often principle” where managers become so used to signing slips of paper that they no longer check what they are signing. “Radar O’Reilly signatures are what results” he said, in reference to the popular Mash television character.
Whether or not we are turning into Radar O’Reilys with how used to signing documents we become, what is clear is that the risk of documents slipping unchecked into the public domain is a very real one. All it would take is a simple slip of the keyboard for an email to accidentally head towards a member of the press, particularly with the common reliance on auto-complete for addressing emails.