All partners, unfortunately, must be viewed by information protection professionals as foes and given only what they need to know, when they need to know it. Unfortunately, CI is becoming increasingly at odds with information protection. Techniques similar to a cracker s social engineering are being employed to gain competitive information. Pure CI does not employ such techniques, nor does it allow manipulations to extract information. But such purity is rare.
Information protection dovetails with content control.
The only way to ensure information protection is to help those involved in providing content for the extranet with an understanding of the strategic value of information. With that awareness in hand, the next step is to facilitate ownership of that value. In essence, that means that people who supply content actually own the strategic value of what they supply. They must consider if the information they are putting out there is necessary for the particular application. People are generally excited to take ownership of information, and to think about its strategic value.