Monthly Archives: May 2012

SharePoint and Information Security

Interesting survey was recently published by Cryptozone on SharePoint security. The results are evidence of need and importance of information management governance and proper, upfront design of the information systems. It appears that in most of organizations, the responsibility for assigning of the access rights to SharePoint documents still belongs to IT Administrators, as it was indicated by 69% of respondents. At least this segment of users knew who was in charge; in contrast to 22% who did not even know who managed it. The problem with ceding of the responsibility for content protection entirely to IT is that IT primary focus is on maintenance and configuration of the technical infrastructure, but with limited knowledge and understanding of the content and its specific protection needs. IT cannot and should not make decisions on how particular type of information should be protected, and who should have access to it.

So who should be responsible for making such decisions? The answer seems to be intuitive – the business – but 43% of respondents said that they do not trust document authors to control who should read their documents. This would indicate that most of the users have low levels of awareness and understanding of the security needs. This seems to be confirmed by another set of responses that indicated that over 45% of users did copy sensitive and confidential information to unprotected USB memory sticks and emails. 55% of these respondents claimed that reason for this was the need for sending necessary information to users without access to SharePoint, with further 43% needing it for working at home. Over 30% of users were more concerned about getting the work done rather than security, and another 47% did not even think about security or did not care.

One of the contributing factors leading to taking documents out of SharePoint’s control, was the need to share it with third parties – over 56% of respondents said that their organizations did not have external portals to help with collaboration outside of the organization.

The bottom line is that this exposes the organizations to risks including legal risks and intellectual property theft. Therefore proper solution would be to give some thought before SharePoint is rolled out, answering questions on how the information is going to flow across the organization, how it is going to be accessed, how users will be segmented by their needs and how it is going to be protected. This should lead to development of information management governance, that would clearly describe roles and responsibilities across the organization, and ways how the information should be distributed and protected. Lastly, the most important step is to make the users aware of the security needs, training them on the policies and periodically reinforcing this knowledge.

Business Process Management key to successful implementation of information management

Business processes are integral part of information management. In organizational context they could be compared to cardio-vascular systems in living organisms, with blood being represented by information, and the processes by structure of veins and valves. Like with the organism, inefficient circulation will lead the organization to poor performance, inability to compete, which as end result could be fatal. Business processes could be defined as a set of related, structured activities and discrete tasks, moving and enhancing business information to achieve specific goals and objectives. They could be divided into three groups:

  • Management processes – governing operations of the organization often called ‘corporate governance’
  • Operational processes – set of core business activities to generate value and revenues, like manufacturing, purchasing, sales, or marketing
  • Supporting processes – set of auxiliary activities supporting the core, operational processes, for example HR, accounting, information technology, and support

The processes exhibit certain common characteristics:

  • Definition – they have clearly defined scope,  inputs and outputs
  • Sequencing – the activities could be sequenced and prioritized for execution
  • Benefactor – there must be specified recipient of the process outcome
  • Value – adding value during the process of transforming or carrying the data
  • Inclusion – they exist in the context of the organization
  • Cross-functionality – the process often spans multiple functions within organization

There are two concepts related to process management: Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Although both deal with the process control and flow of information, and sharing many common characteristics, there is however a significant difference between the two. Business Process Management is an ongoing initiative with set of operational activities to capture, define, monitor, and to gradual improve the organizational benefits. BPM is often implemented using bottom-up approach, and it introduces more gentle change to the organization. Business Process Reengineering on the other hand, is more project oriented, with clearly defined end-state and timeline, redesigning the processes and transforming the organization. It is often implemented as top-down approach and requires much stronger organizational change management activities on many fronts within the organization. BPR initiatives could create lot of apprehension among the workers, due to introduced change in work habits, and often their key success measurement relates to reduction of the workforce.

Formalization, standardization and automation of business processes can introduce several benefits to the organizations:

  • Better utilization of organization’s workforce
  • Improved process speed
  • Reduction in number of errors
  • Costs reduction
  • Risks reduction
  • Improved customer service
  • Duplicate work reduction
  • Improved visibility of the processes and their efficiencies

Formal business processes implementation might need to resolve several issues:

–   Staff resistance to change – new processes will impact the ways how the work is done right now, and could introduce fears related to exposing potential inefficiencies, resulting in workforce reduction, or transferring to other departments

  • Implementation time is often lengthy due to need of discovery and documentation of hidden, informal processes, and their adjustments
  •  ‘Butterfly effect’ – any small inaccuracies in identification of the sub-processes, could translate into larger problems down the value chain
  • Difficulty in finding skilled resources to deliver
  • Insufficient funding – most of organizations face budgetary constraints today, while the business process changes often require substantial time and money commitments
  • Lack of management support – formalization and automation of business processes might not be on the top of management’s priority list.

The process automation could be categorized by complexity of the implementation, and organizations could select one or more depending on their needs:

1. Routing

Routing is the simplest implementation of the business processes, addressing ad-hoc needs of the end users. Usually they linearly move information from person to person, without integrating with information generating or consuming applications. They are often employed for user notification about waiting task and monitoring of the completion status. The users need to open and process the tasks manually. That type of solution gives limited ability, if any, to implement rules associated with the process.

2. Workflow

Workflow is more sophisticated implementation of the business process automation. Among others, it allows running processes not only serially but also in parallel, saving time and improving productivity. The processes can also have defined complex set of rules, exceptions and conditions. Often there is a graphical user interface that allows for easy customization of the workflow. Useful feature of workflows is the ‘role’ concept allowing assigning tasks to roles rather than to specific people. In cases where user is unavailable, a rule could assign the task to another person, belonging to the same role. Completion of the task could trigger next step in the process chain.

3. Business Process Management

The Business Process Management is extending this concept further, to the whole enterprise, allowing crossing platforms, applications and repositories. It addresses complexities of the cross-departmental processes, and allows for their standardization. Implementation of automation requires identification of core practices and detailed analysis of business rules and triggers. Flowcharting and process modeling are two of the techniques used for this purpose. Flowcharts are graphical representation of sequence of steps and decision branches. They are excellent tools to provide blueprint for implementation, as well as could serve as communication and change management instruments. Process models on the other hand, are more elaborate tools adding intelligence, dependencies and levels to the process tasks. The simulation functionality allows identifying and resolving potential bottlenecks, inefficiencies and loops. Integration and operational monitoring of the processes could help with continuous improvement. Since the implementation of BPM is much more complex than with other two categories, it requires careful planning, change management and funding.