Procurement policy hardly gets the pulse racing at the best of times. It is not exactly surprising that police procurement, with all the associated internecine battles between the Home Office, the police service and the police authorities, has often been viewed by politicians as best avoided. It is refreshing then, that the Home Affairs Select Committee has chosen to wade into this quagmire, with its report into the New Landscape for Policing coming up with some intriguing recommendations.
The world of Document and Content Management has seen a flurry of activity around standards and best practice in recent weeks. Here are some of the highlights:
The following 4 announcements may be of interest to you:
1. The DLM Forum has published MoReq2010 (Modular Requirements for Records Systems), or to be more precise “MoReq2010® Core Services & Plug-in Modules.”
Feedback on the requirements is invited at this site.
2. BSI has published PAS 89 “Enterprise Content Management – Code of Practice” for consultation. The consultation expires on 19 Aug 2011. Click to register, comment on and/or download it.
3. A second version of the German Trade Association for Document Management’s ‘Legal Requirements for Document Management in Europe’ has been published and covers Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. Copies are downloadable for free.
4. For those that have not already received copies, please feel free to download the Intellect Document & Content Management Group papers on ‘The Impact of Social Media on Enterprise Content Management’ and on ‘Guidance for Producing a Paper Destruction and Disposal Policy.’
After her speech to the Police Federation in May was met by a stony silence, the Home Secretary came out swinging at the ACPO conference yesterday afternoon. Lambasting those chief constables that have moved more slowly on reducing bureaucracy than some of their more savvy peers, Theresa May soon had the protracted procurement process in her sights. The headline reform was the creation of a Police ICT company, the main conclusion of the long-awaited Wasserman Review.
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Twitter sparked the Arab Spring; it helped Ahmadinejad cripple his political opponents; it gave a running commentary on the assault on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound; it enhances the Israeli military’s situational awareness; it is a medium for terror cells to communicate and recruit.
Twitter fuelled the anti-cuts protests in London; it allowed the Met Police to warn the public of the violent ‘Black Bloc’ tactics; it coordinated humanitarian relief in the wake of the Haitian earthquake and Pakistani floods; it is the favoured tool of the US State Department to monitor democratic opposition in authoritarian regimes. It is quicker to Tweet than call 999 and, as Ryan Giggs can testify, Twitter has now outstripped UK law. And it does all this in 140 characters.
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Intellect’s JESICA Chair Terry Skinner today gave oral evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into the New Landscape of Policing. (more…)
The political furore surrounding the location of Osama bin Laden’s not-so-hidden compound has rightly taken most of the headlines since his demise at the hands of US Special Forces last week. However, as analysts pore over the finer details of these dramatic events, they will be struck by the consistency with which technology appears as the critical success factor throughout this meticulously planned operation.
The storming of the Abbottabad compound involved up to four helicopters, 40 highly-trained Navy SEALS from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, and a huge array of ICT-enabled technologies. Remarkably, the event was relayed throughout cyberspace in real-time by two Pakistani Twitter users oblivious to the exact target of the operation.
Back to Intellect’s Document & Content Management Group session- Jonathan Beardsley has practical experience of implementing social networking in a business context, drawing on the example of the G20 summit held in Canada 2010. On top of the social collaboration tool for the 125 delegates attending the conference, Open Text produced a secondary platform for engaging with the 3500 journalists covering the G20. The search tools available could identify content of interest as well as relevant individuals in the network.
Welcome to Intellect’s live blog on ‘Social Media Thursday’. Hot on the heels of this morning’s Financial Services Group meeting on social media as a corporate asset, it’s the Document & Content Management Group’s turn to get in on the act.
First up is Thomas Power, founder and Chairman of Ecademy, a social network for entrepreneurs with 600,000 members. Thomas opens with a You Tube video explaining his idea for Facebook to become a bank. That this tongue in cheek concept was picked up by several leading multinational banks within days of being posted online is illustrative of the potential and pace of social media.
Global leaders from business, politics and academia have issued a sharp riposte to recent claims that the threat of cyber security has been ‘overhyped.’ Rebutting distorted media coverage of the OECD report, ‘Reducing systemic cybersecurity risk’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting at Davos last week saw cyber security at the top of the policy agenda. In the sixth edition of its own report, Global risks 2011, the WEF cites cyber security as one of the principal emerging threats to businesses and nation states alike. Quite apart from being exaggerated, the WEF suggests that the ‘risks’ of cyber security ‘could be underestimated.’
The publication of the OECD report Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk has sparked a spate of misleading news stories claiming that the study demonstrates that the ‘risks of cyber war have been ‘over-hyped’.’ There is of course a delicious irony that the media is now misrepresenting and simplifying a report that supposedly identifies misrepresentation and simplification in the cyber agenda, but let’s put the record straight.
Professor Sommer and Brown’s report does indeed argue for a more nuanced approach to cyber security challenges. As this blogger pointed out in an article in November, the sensationalized media portrayal of cyber security, such as the recent mushroom-cloud embossed Economist article, is unhelpful. Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk accurately describes how cyber attacks can vary radically from pedestrian ‘phishing’ scams to ‘multi-stranded stealth onslaught’ and that a more focussed response demands the establishment of a sophisticated and multi-layered common cyber vocabulary.
Any interpretation that uses this to question the Strategic Defence and Security Review’s designation of cyber security as a tier-1 threat is guilty of the same conflation of cyber warfare and cyber security in the round that the Professors criticise! That there are vulnerabilities that affect seemingly mundane activities, such as online medical health records and tax returns, is the very reason cyber is such a potentially disruptive threat. Indeed the report itself, in contrast with its presentation in the media, highlights the significance of this ‘interconnectedness’, pointing out that ‘victims of cybersecurity lapses and attacks include many civilian systems.’
Equally, the statement that ‘it is unlikely that there will ever be a true cyberwar’ should not be taken out of context. The authors are simply explaining that cyber attacks will be employed alongside, rather than instead of, conventional weapons. This should certainly not be read as an intention to reduce the significance of these new technologies – this much is clear through the report’s statement that ‘the use of cyber weaponry will shortly become ubiquitous.’
It is the very breadth of cyber security challenges that make it such a potent threat. It would be a great shame if this rigorously researched report were viewed through the same binary lens that Professors Sommer and Brown have set out to condemn.