Wikileaks and Digital Renaissance

This is a followup of my earlier thoughts on Cablegate...

I had few fundamental questions in my mind about the implications of Cablegate on the Enterprises. Wikileaks , in my mind is very akin to what hotmail did to the world of emails and what iPod did to the mp3 players. The concept was not new, but it started a new era where the core concept found acceptance and evolved exponentially.

Julian Assange and his spirited team have taught us that we are living in an era of Openness. We leave trails of our thoughts all over the digital world. The world, its netizens and the organisations are more wired than ever. Whilst being closely wired has brought it great benefits of transparency , faster access to the information; unfortunately it has its byproducts as well which we are witnessing through the recent dawn of Wikileaks.

Like how the medieval European era progressed to the great Colonisation and Industrial revolution after the renaissance, we are just stepping into a digital renaissance era.
If we do a rewind of the time by few centuries and land up in Florence, Tuscany around 14th century and take a peek at what is going on , there are plenty of lessons to learn. The pages of 14th century Italy is one of the most glamorous pages of the human civilisation. It was a tipping point for many events that unfolded  and pushed the entire world to the newer dimensions.

A very practical example would that of our very own lives. If somebody had mentioned to me about what he/she could find about me by a simple googling, 5 years back, I would have simply laughed it off. The reality now is completely different , there are more information available about me (which i post in multiple sites) that my close friend may know not about me. This is a new reality, this is not going to change.

What does this mean for an Enterprise?

Primarily the employees are going to be talking more about themselves and their work in various social networking site. Your employees , collegues [and you] are very likely to lose a smartphone device which has lot of information about your company.Inspite of the huge spends on the security software, hackers are going to resort more to the social engineering than breaking their heads off to sneak in to your servers.

What would/could emerge?

Enterprise 4.0 is going to be more open. It is going to be aligned to our life styles in the digital world than resembling to the current state of traditional organisation which worked well in the pre-digital era.

The Enterprise 4.0 should cope up with the fast emerging technology and hence needs to be built on the closest way we react to the external information.

This is going to be a new digital renaissance and we better buckle up!