How Encanvas could have saved Nationwide £980,000 in a single day

It must be ‘gutting’ to the customers of Nationwide to find out that they will be soon forking out close to £1 million to the FSA as a financial penalty for a lapse in the company’s data security that they had nothing to do with. ‘Doubly gutting’ after being told that their personal information is now somewhere in the ether because it was being held on a laptop stolen from an employee's home in August, 2006!

Those that live outside the corporate world must be thinking how on earth something like this could possibly happen with all of the alleged security protocols that corporations are being encouraged to adopt. How on earth could the personal information of 11 million customers find its way onto the hard-drive of a laptop that could be so easily lost?

I suspect there are many business people upon hearing this story will have a wry smile on their face in the knowledge that holding business strategic data on hard drives is not so uncommon. They probably see the practice going on inside the company they’re working for every other day. In the cold light of day, it becomes almost possible to second-guess how this story played out.

There remains a huge gap between well-organized, highly secure back-office information systems that support business continuity, and the daily needs of corporate workers, starved of the information they need to discharge their roles.

A recent Accenture sponsored survey (Jan 2007) reported that most middle managers found that the majority of information obtained for their work is useless and only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.

Small wonder then that knowledge workers like our friend in Nationwide succumb to beating up the IT department to provide an export of the information they need to fulfil their role and walk out the door with the company’s customer database under their arm.

When will companies like Nationwide come to realize that for less than $200,000 a year they could avoid these ‘miss-haps’ by providing appropriate tools that enable workers to access information as they need it - to be as effective as they know they can be?

Business agility software like Encanvas bridges across pockets of information held within the organization (and beyond its firewall) to provide information workers with the ability to ‘serve themselves’ with the information they need within a trusted framework of security. Encanvas formalizes information flows that manage how workers access and use information without being forced to work at arms length.

A saving of £980,000 in one day. That’s quite an ROI.