Careless Comms

How much do your competitors know about you? Blogs, wikis, text messages and e-mail are just some of the ways in which you could be inadvertently leaking confidential information.

In the old days, if you wanted to do a sneaky bit of competitive intelligence (CI) to see what a competitor was up to, you simply asked for a copy of that competitor’s catalogue to be sent to your mum’s address; or perhaps you gleaned what you were you after from sharing a drink at a conference and exchanging horror stories about your bosses.

Increasingly, there’s a trend for companies to offer CI analysis that’s a lot more active. For example, one CI company offers to “mine your competitor web sites, online catalogues, news feeds and regulatory filings, and extracting data from PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Word docs and e-mail archives in a fully automated way”. As an IT manager, you need to be aware of the potential benefits of CI; you also need be on your guard against confidential information leaking from your own company.

The Blogosphere
One reason for the rise of CI is the sheer amount of information that is now publicly available. This information may be made available deliberately, but it may be released accidentally through the ever rising tide of blogs, wikis, text messages, e-mail and other electronic communications.

The rise in numbers of blogs in particular is staggering. When Technorati (www.technorati.com) produced its 2007 report on the blogosphere, it reported that it is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created in every second of every day.

So how do you keep your confidential business information confidential? Some of those emerging blogs may be penned by your own employees, and they may be revealing company information that is useful to your competitors. In one recent case, the changes that the Ford Motor Company was making to various models in the US were mentioned in blogs ahead of the official announcements.

It’s not just blogs that are leaking information. If you look at social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, it’s amazing the details people reveal about themselves. More serious business networks like LinkedIn add to the information-fest, and if someone from a competitor becomes “friendly” with one of your employees via such networks, can you be sure no information will be exchanged?

While most competitive intelligence needs human intelligence for gathering it, products are available that can be used to help work through the mountains of information. The software provides the means to automatically search web sites and blogs for information relevant to the market sector of the company doing the searching. Office documents and e-mail archives can also be searched if available. The users of the software can enter keywords and phrases to look for, and these are used by a text analytics engine that works with unstructured data and turns it into formats that are more easily analysed.

One technique offered by competitive intelligence software is that of “sentiment indicators”. These are used to work out how the person writing a particular entry on a web site or blog feels about a product or brand.

Given the increasing use of CI, how can you protect your company secrets? One approach is to apply a strict “need to know” method of information management – don’t tell anyone anything unnecessary. The problem here is knowing who needs to know things, and the IT department probably doesn’t make the decisions about who should know anyway. What you do need is a set of guidelines to ensure people know what they can talk about, where and when.

Top Confidentialty Tips

• Rate documements etc according to whether they can be discussed in e-mails, SMS, blogs, with partners, customers and the press, and so on. Post these ratings on a secure corporate portal.
• Create and manage a content workflow, with rules for who gets to see the information and what they can do with it.
• Use Information Rights Management to prevent unauthorised copying of confidential documents.
• Create secure communications mechanisms for employees working remotely or on the move.
• Set up a company blog in which all comments from employees are acceptable, even if they’re negative. Some specialists recommend that partners and customers should also be able to add comments and blog entries. That way, all negative comments appear in one place where you can respond to them.