* Does policy drive technology or does technology drive policy?
One of the most difficult “convergence” tasks in most organizations is converging policy with technology.
A recent interaction with a not-for-profit organization really drove this home for us, and we fear that many larger organizations are not doing a lot better. For that reason, the organization will stay anonymous, and we’ll simply call it Acme Associates, in honor of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
Like many organizations, Acme has a large membership of volunteers and contacts, and massive effort goes into producing various newsletters and publications. Like many publications – especially where the “news” includes personal tidbits like job promotions, births and marriages – there is a degree of concern about privacy. However, because such newsletters have been in production since shortly after the time of Gutenberg, most members are relatively content to have this type of news circulated among the membership in a printed format.
However, the privacy alerts start going off like crazy as soon as the same information becomes available on “the ‘Net.”
For many, there’s the admittedly false security blanket that if the information is available only in a PDF format, that’s OK because search engines (like Google) have historically not crawled PDF files to the extent that “normal” Web pages are indexed. However, as the search engines have gotten better, so have their capabilities to index PDF files.
When we recently discovered that Acme Associates’ newsletters were now searchable in full text, we called the director in charge of corporate communications. We were curious about the policy change because we had just had a discussion about this not more than a month earlier. Interestingly, he directed us to the Webmaster to see what the policy was. And the Webmaster informed us that a not-for-profit version of Google now indexes PDFs, and, to his knowledge, there was no way to exclude this option.
Frankly, we could not care less whether the printed document is available as a searchable entity. But we’re appalled that the addition of a feature by Google is driving the policy, as opposed to the policy being established and the Web site conforming to the policy.
So we’re curious. To what extent are technology and policy integrated in your organization? And which function is driving which? Let us know, and we’ll let you know what we hear back.
