Information Sharing

Firstly, the following represents my perspective from my experience working on various information sharing projects during my career as well as discussing these projects with other implementers and decision makers.  The views do not represent any organization’s views, employers past or present, this is just Chris speaking.

The technological barriers to sharing information have been broken down.  Technologies like Web Services and Xml, and standards such as NIEM provide us with structured ways to describe and map our data into other formats and to communicate about that data at the technology and business level.  Since I started working in IT I have seen enormous capacity for reducing duplicate work and passing information across department and organizational boundaries to help people do their jobs.  No where has this been more evident than my time spent in the criminal justice community.

Three distinct forces present themselves for every information sharing project: People, Process, and Policy.

The Perils of People, Process, and Policy

People have both legitimate and selfish reasons for not wanting to share information.  With the state of our legal system and the rampant liabilities that come into play many people who will be directly affected by information sharing have real concerns about how the information will be used.  On the counterpoint, the territorial issues come into play as well.  Some people just don’t want to share their information with out you asking in person.  The idea that computer systems will be quietly passing information under their control is unsettling and can elicit very strong objections.

Process affects how we perform our daily tasks.   Where this is no process, there is no tool that will make it better.  Simply introducing information sharing does not fix the process; that fix requires the effort of people to examine that process and make real changes in how their duties are performed.  When information sharing is driven by an external entity and people are forced to look at their own processes this can be difficult.  It takes a very skilled team of project leaders at a higher level to make these things less threatening and more open.

Policy affects what we are allowed to do (and often how we do it).  When policy isn’t ready, some information that would be useful to send, isn’t sent because a policy was set up to prevent it.  Sometimes the policy is based on statutes or laws in place to protect privacy concerns, other times the policy was just based on a decision made years before that was never revisited as technology, and people, changed.  Just as process must be examined, so too must policy.

The Potential of People, Process, and Policy

Web 2.0 taught us a lot about information sharing.  What if you provided a public API and provided structured access to your data?  What could become possible?  Because ultimately information sharing is about possibilities. 

Before the web APIs were opened we did not have maps that could display myriads of information from disparate sources using the Internet.  We weren’t able to take data that was uniquely ours and mash it up with data that we didn’t own.  The business had a hard time seeing what was possible because, quite simply, IT made things seem impossible. 

The tides have changed because now IT is no longer a barrier.  As new IT professionals come into the world they see the possibilities because they have experienced them; they have mashed things up, linked Twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. They have seen the revolutions blogging, RSS, and ATOM have inspired.  There is nothing holding the information back except those who aren’t ready for the information to flow: The processes, policies, and people who are still standing in the way, afraid to give up a little control and embrace the possibilities that are there.

A fellow blogger from my work in the library world maintains a blog with the tagline “Information Wants to Be Free”.  The phrase can be traced back to 1984, when Stewart Brand is quoted in the following context “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

25 years later truer words have not been spoken.  The technical barriers have been broken down.  It’s time to unleash the potential of People, Process, and Policy in connection with the IT capabilities we have in the Web 2.0 world.