I rarely get wound up at what I read in the IT press, but the headline and some of the content of this gem got me going. It's not so much the speculation of a once every 5 year screw up (once every 5 minutes it seems of late), it's the apparant resignation of the whole thing, and the lack of acknowledgement of responsibility.

Why am I so wound up? We just completed a pretty in-depth review of organisations' information governance (and underlying information management capabilities—you can't have the former without the latter—at least if you want it to work) capabilities and the headline findings explain why we are seeing so many information related screw ups these days.

Governance in general is starting to drive corporate requirements and activities, but drill down to the 'information governance' layer (information being the 'lifeblood of the modern business'—cliched but true) and we see lack of ability/effort on a grand scale:

• No central ownership of responsibility for information governance;
• Inadaquate information retention policies;
• Poor or little ability to classify, archive and retrieve information.

If what I'm reading about and discovering during my research activities is anything to go by, then the apparant and constant haemorrhaging of the 'lifeblood' by numerous organisations entrusted with our information means there will be soon some well deserved flat-lining in the proverbial operating room. If thats what it takes, then so be it. We can't consider even for a minute another Ford Pinto scenario, where major corporations would rather clean up mess after mess than design their businesses to work properly in the first place.

The sad thing is that many organisations claim to have policies and processes in place to deal with information related incidents, yet we find that under the covers that they, and the tools in use, are simply are not up to the job. Maybe they were 10 or 20 years ago. Not any more.

Like the first batch of the Internet revolution companies discovered too late, you can't build a business from the outside in—if there is no structure, process, management capability (people and technology) then you will fail. Doing business properly costs money. Time for some hard talking in the boardroom, medium term expectation setting of lower dividends, and some spending of profit to get process, people and information mangement capabilities up to scratch.

I have no idea how this translates into the public sector, but simple maths dictates that if you employ less people that don't care about doing a good job, there is more cash to pay a smaller number of people that do. 'We can't pay our staff well enough to care' won't wash for much longer. Then there's IT investment, but we'll save that for another day.