Is your company too innovative? Are your engineers reading material beyond their immediate assignment? Is your audio expert taking too much of an interest in machine learning? Is your corporate culture so strong that it needs to be whittled down to command and control of automatons?
Here are simple steps to make execution slower than a dried up slug:
- Divide your company into as many groups as possible
- Handpick the least co-operative people and empower them to deny access requests
- Classify the company knowledge into meaningless overlapping categories
- Build elaborate processes around how each category is handled and revise those processes every few months
- Further split the knowledge into Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive folders, each with limited access permissions
- Encrypt all information
- Mandate usage of special tools to decrypt information that you already have access to.
On a more serious note, there are legitimate safeguards that a company needs to implement to keep its innovations from leaking out. One needs to implement them with limited scope and even then, emphasize that sharing knowledge enables the organization to be a learning organization that moves fast.
Here are my recommended steps:
- Start with trust
- Ensure that trusted people have unfettered access to the information they need
- This means engineers get access to engineering documents
- Limit access as required by regulation and by genuine business need
- Earnings outlook, production and supply outlook, etc.
- Acquisitions, divestitures, etc.
- Watch points of ingress and egress
- Lock down SD cards, USB sticks, private email, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
- Limit internet access to a list of reputed websites that are audited regularly
- Eliminate usage of company devices for personal purposes
- Accelerate the timeline from design to patent filing
- Rapidly flag violations and include immediate supervisors in the violation notice
- Design documents are naturally resistant to the most common attacks - such as pictures or screenshots - ensure wide availability of these documents since they increase organization intelligence
- Audit regularly for company content on the public internet
Anything else is eventually making your organization slower and dumber. Talented people soon leave and that only accelerates the demise of the organization.
Don't let your organization become a resting place for dead slugs. Rethink document access.
