5.3 Corporate Castles, the Bastions of eCommerce

In the Middle Ages, the local lord typically built a castle and installed a moat around it to defend the inhabitants from enemies or invaders. The presence of the imposing structure of the castle provided a psychological impact on the local population, travellers and rival factions. Today’s corporate websites have taken a similar approach, constructing firewalls and other security measures to prevent the malicious intentions of potential hackers and provide a secure medium to transact business. However, a castle was more than a building or residence of a wealthy lord or king. It was a centre of administrative power; it provided defence capabilities, commerce and a sense of order. Whether the sense of order was motivated by fear or loyalty to a protector scholars have debated for centuries. It does bear a strange similarity to today’s corporate culture. Employees have been attached to companies through fear of job loss, loyalty to past corporate performance and many of the same reasons that can be equated to medieval society.

As with medieval society, the corporate mindset (many times magnified by the technology organization) has moved from a protector-provider attitude to an exploiter commoditizing workers’ activities into a very fluid workforce. For example, firewall technology was developed with one primary function in mind, to protect the corporate computing environment from hackers and other individuals that can harm, damage or manipulate corporate information. The technology is now being employed to monitor employees’ activities, prevent employees from visiting questionable websites and censor information so that individuals are not wasting company time looking at material that is deemed inappropriate for them. This phenomenon began under the guise of filtering out pornography and is now branching into other material the company deems inappropriate. The next logical step is to stop people from seeing sports scores, the stock market, news broadcasts and so on because it wastes time. Yet employers are excited to know that employees are now working at home executing various tasks in order to keep up with the increased levels of communication on their own time. Maybe the next Internet filter software application will enable families to filter out parents doing work at home after working hours. However, while this does not happen – much to the chagrin of wives, husbands and children of businesspeople – some corporations are now using web-caching servers to copy from the net only those pages that are deemed appropriate and making them available on their intranet for employees. Although this sounds well intentioned, the implications are counter to the very nature of the World Wide Web. It does bring to mind a question: By exposing individuals to the vast amount of information on the Internet, will they become smarter or more informed? The decline of the Middle Ages can be attributed to the increase in knowledge and literacy beyond the aristocracy of the day. As people became more knowledgeable, they demanded more rights and self-government. As Michael Hammer put it:

Corporate walls have traditionally been high, hard and heavily guarded. We can think of corporations as fortified castles that transacted arms-length business with each other. Typically, companies defined themselves in terms of a discrete set of products and services – making valves, distributing snack foods, or insuring middle-income clients. Their inputs included orders from customers, raw materials from suppliers, and various forms of market intelligence. Within the castle these inputs were processed to produce outputs that were tossed over the walls as products and services for customers and payments to suppliers. The company’s processes were self-contained; they began and ended at the company ramparts. The classical strategy of integration was one of expanding the castle walls so as to encompass even more within it.^[139]

Corporations will use technology at an ever-increasing rate to redefine their business process and endeavour to remove many of the internal walls of the corporate structure. The barriers are products of two intersecting structures: the transition between process steps – which is inherent in transferring work between functional groups – and the passing of information within the hierarchical bureaucracy. The second evolution will be to continue this process of technological transformation with processes beyond the confines of the corporation to external partners and other entities.

In the Middle Ages, a primary source of defence was to erect walls around a city or castle to repel an attacker’s ability to conquer and lay siege to the population. Today corporations have embraced the fact that doing business and performing core business functions on the Internet or a private extranet is the new way business will be conducted. However, safeguarding corporate information from unwanted intruders is being done with the help of firewall technology. A firewall or information filter provides a sense that only legitimate users or trading partners have access to information. Some overzealous technology managers have tried to use firewall and filter technology on their corporate user’s community to keep individuals from visiting sites on the Internet that they have deemed unsuitable. Resources would be better spent on providing users with self-servicing filters that allow them to establish filters to keep out the unwanted eMail traffic plaguing many users. Firewall technology can also be leveraged in a proactive manner to manipulate corporate data and make it available to individuals within the corporation in a variety of forms. Filters used in conjunction with intelligent agents can broker the exchange of corporate data on behalf of a user and provide information by which decisions can be made. Many user communities’ initial reaction to the implementation of firewall technology is negative, seeming like big brother is looking through information that may be harmful to us or that individuals are not responsible enough not to visit questionable sites. An effective strategy should not attempt to restrict or monitor user behaviour and thereby alienate people. A comprehensive strategy is to create an environment so rich with information that individuals will not have time to look for information that does not enhance their job. The cold reality is that individuals who are bored at work and use the Internet during working hours to play will eventually find some other medium to play. So, why punish all users with gross impunity when social pressures in the workplace will correct unwanted behaviours?

If we consider the question of undesirable activities and corporate security, we can determine that there are two distinct operating philosophies:

A reactive strategy (such as the erection of a firewall to thwart enemies coupled with the institution of software filters to govern behaviour)
A proactive strategy of self-direction, in which the company outlines its expectations of individual behaviour and trusts people to act in a professional manner, self-policing the actions of their peers, in the same way corporations embraced casual work clothing.

These two operating philosophies can also be applied beyond the corporation to individual lifestyles with regard to the growing apprehension around the Internet’s influence on family values and other social problems.

^[139]M. Hammer, Beyond Reengineering: How the Process-centred Organization is Changing Our Work and Our Lives (London: HarperCollins, 1998) p. 170.