The right time, the right place

Have you realized the importance or criticality of business information being delivered at the right time, at the right place? So, I was at this seminar where unfortunately I was paneled with some top industry honchos to discuss enterprise agility and information as the fourth factor of production. Some of the disclosures from these guys were deep and insightful.

The panel went on and on about how security of information has become the top priority of an enterprise and various ways and means and technologies to ensure security of business-critical information. It was a very interesting discussion. Since I was among the lesser mortals, I was only a passive spectator to all this commotion.

Finally not being able to take the constant bombardment of highly intellectual content, I asked my fellow panel members and the vibrant, well-oiled audience comprising CIOs and other CXOs: “I have some mission-critical, business-critical information locked in my safe which has three mirrors in three different continents and I am the only person who has access to this. Also, to open the safe there are four of us (top management) who need to come together to open the same. Now unfortunately, I need some part of this information but one of my fellow colleagues is on vacation in the Hawaii islands and another is down with suspected malaria. What good is this highly secure information to me?”

After some silence, all members of the panel tried to give me enough hope that there are ways to work around this, and ensure security and availability of business-critical information.

It ain’t that easy.

The infrastructure that supports business-critical information in an organization continues to boggle the minds of the brightest of CIOs. Vendors have been running pillar to post trying to ensure the enterprise users with various technology tools and services in creating value of information, enable always available information architecture and secured storage, retrieval and modification of this information, within an enterprise.

Then there are cases where information is available, and secure, but there is so much of it that it is not useful to the user. The bigger challenge here is for the user to actually spend time to decide what information is really useful to him.

The fact of the case still remains. Information is only useful if it is available at the right time at the right place and most importantly the right amount.