The Right People Creating Information

It's probably a safe bet that you wouldn't want the college nurse to be responsible for drafting your commercial contracts, nor for your procurement officer to be writing advice for students on meningitis. It is important that those responsible for creating information possess the authority and the ability to do so. This may require careful consideration of which functions and/or individuals within the organisation are trusted to create the information in question.

Proof Of Provenance

Once such responsibilities have been defined, it is usually easy to enforce them through system logins and the privileges attached to them (read only, read/write, system administration etc). However, it may be more difficult to automatically control at a systems level when it comes to creating documents, spreadsheets or emails. There is usually nothing to physically prevent anyone creating a document and calling it 'Annual Report 2007' or sending an email to the head of a neighbouring institution requesting a merger. These may be extreme examples that would be easy to spot as being bogus, but they serve to illustrate the point. The ability to prove its provenance and who was responsible for creating a particular piece of information could well be vital for protecting your institution's legal interests.

If this cannot be achieved by system functionality other possibilities may be to rely on the use of templates to which only relevant people have access, other types of authentication (such as biometric authentication), or the use of security controlled storage and publication facilities.

The Dangers Of Over-Restricting Access

Of course putting too many barriers in the way of creating information may well be counter-productive and lead to user frustration and disengagement. Mandating that only the academic who authored a paper can deposit it in your repository may help ensure the integrity of the system's contents but is also likely to reduce the number of submissions from busy staff with little time or appetite for such administrative tasks.

The Benefits Of Unfettered Access

Much of the new generation of technology that is emerging is founded on the principles of collaboration and sharing. Social software applications such as wikis work on the basis that anyone who wants to contribute content is free to do so. It is for others to judge the quality of the information they create and to either embrace or ignore it as appropriate. The online encyclopaedia, wikipedia is perhaps the best known example of this.

This approach may well be highly beneficial where the objective is to get as many people as possible to contribute their ideas and opinions - especially in situations where everyone's point of view is likely to be equally valid. The important thing to ensure is that those wishing to make use of this information are aware of its mixed origins and the fact that it may represent opinions (as opposed to facts) based on differing degrees of experience and knowledge.