Information Sharing

There are many good and well explored reasons to share information, but in business as well as government you have to be very careful. Each organisation has its own legal and fiduciary responsibilities, and duty of care, to protect and manage its own information assets, particularly personal information. Customers, suppliers and partners expect you to take care of the information they supply to you, and you have a right to expect the same of them. There are many traps to be wary of, particularly when you allow other parties to use your computer systems to seek information from you. Who is he? Is he one of our partners? Is he allowed? Does the information he seeks have special restrictions? What do we need him to do when he does get the information? Will his computer understand the information in the same way as we do? Can we guarantee its accuracy?

If you need to collaborate with more than one other party, developing point to point connections are rapidly going to become unmanageable. It makes it very difficult to change or upgrade any of your systems without upsetting the collaboration links, so you get locked in. Using a collaboration hub keeps all parties independent.

The rules and policies for information sharing that each organisation has should really be applied across all of their applications, because they need to be consistent. But many policies are embedded in the applications which are often from different sources, so not consistent, or visible. This makes it very difficult to share information safely. Rules and policies should be in the infrastructure, not the applications.

Every organisation and its IT service is unique, tailored to its own particular business needs. Rather than trying to devise and enforce detailed standards on all the parties you collaborate with, why not make your collaboration infrastructure do all the necessary translations of data, users, subjects, policies etc? Then you do not have to re-engineer all your applications to be able to collaborate. It will also enable you to engage easily with new partners.

InMezzo’s Open4:RecordExchange is a highly scalable information collaboration hub. It provides all the administration facilities you need for EAI and SOA implementations, and makes implementation a great deal easier. It provides an administrative interface for you to enter your authorised users, data definitions, rules and policies, and compliance regulations. Your collaborators do the same. Called from your preferred messaging system, the hub controls all the interactions, enforcing each party’s terms. Built in auditing enables dispute resolution and demonstrates compliance.

You remain in control of your own information assets, and do not rely on third parties for its integrity. Information is shared in real time, so is always current. You can automate many more business processes easily, to make considerable savings, without spending lots of money on re-engineering your applications.

Policy & Identity Management Solutions