Data culpability will impact strategy in 2011

Enter the worlds of cloud computing, social media, SMF mobile devices and potential chaos. These are of vital importance as they are far from the centre of normal computing, data capture, data acquisition, data management and data manipulation.

The rule of IT is that the moment something spins away from the centre, control becomes harder. Client/server was harder to manage than host-based computing, and cloud computing is even harder, and social media and mobile devices must surely be the hardest of all to manage.

Organisations need to know who is posting what, which is a business process issue, now process drives data, and data drives culpability, as noted. They as well need to manage the responses, and the business opportunities that arise from those.

Mobile devices are lost, stolen, misplaced or corrupted every day. It is in the nature of mobile devices - notebooks, sub-notebooks, netbooks, smartphones, iPhones, iPads, tablets - that data on these is all nevertheless impossible to control, police, or manipulate. Yet someone must be accountable.