New Civil War at HP at the Highest Levels

The moral of this story: Don’t trust public networks. This isn’t just computer networks, we are talking about voice too. Most of us follow the “security by obscurity” principle. Picking the straws of our communications out of the haystacks outweights the value of the information. But when you play in the big game like the board of directors of HP, you have to think big security.

The confrontation at Hewlett-Packard started innocently enough. Last January, the online technology site CNET published an article about the long-term strategy at HP, the company ranked No. 11 in the Fortune 500. While the piece was upbeat, it quoted an anonymous HP source and contained information that only could have come from a director.

HP’s chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, told another director she wanted to know who it was; she was fed up with ongoing leaks to the media going back to CEO Carly Fiorina’s tumultuous tenure that ended in early 2005.

According to an internal HP e-mail, Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors-not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors’ home and their private cell phones.

It was classic data-mining: Dunn’s consultants weren’t actually listening in on the calls-all they had to do was look for a pattern of contacts. Dunn acted without informing the rest of the board. Her actions were now about to unleash a round of boardroom fury at one of America’s largest companies and a Silicon Valley icon.

Article at MSNBC

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In contrast, IBM embraces and encourages its employees to blog and podcast. Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang points out the benefits to corporations that take that approach.

Corporate Benefits:

* Though[t] leadership: Folks will publish information that they are domain experts at.

* Knowledge Sharing: Employees are sharing tips, tricks, and other helpful information using a variety of mediums.

* SEO Domination: Search Engine Marketing power for topics they discuss.

* Brand Lift: Even non-technology podcasts and blogs help to show the ‘human’ side of a mass company

* It’s fun, encourages collaboration, and inexpensive.