Business Week reported today that a substitute teacher in Connecticut has been convicted of exposing seventh-grade students to pornographic images on a computer in 2004. The teacher, 40-year-old Julie Amero, faces up to 40 years in prison, according to the Associated Press article at the Business Week Web site.
Amero claims some students were looking at a Web site about hair styles, but that the computer she was using soon started popping up pornographic images. She tried to stop the images, she said, but they kept on appearing, and she was under strict orders not to turn the system off.
Amero and others who testified at her trial claim that the older computer had no anti-spyware or anti-pop-up software installed. The principal of the school where Amero was teaching said that the computer lacked such protection because a vendor's bill had gone unpaid – and that no similar incidents had ever happened at the school, before or since. Prosecutors claim Amero clicked on graphic sites intentionally. Meanwhile, some observers wondered why students continued to watch the images on the computer after recognizing what they were watching.
This report follows by a bit more than a week a page-one article by David Lazarus in the San Francisco Chronicle. Lazarus reported that the Indian Consulate in San Francisco dumped thousands of sensitive documents at a recycling center. The documents, including thousands of visa applications, including some submitted by corporate executives and political figures, sat in a yard at the center for more than a month, Lazarus said. Ironically, one visa applicant whose documents were among those found at the recycling center was from Brian Biega, who oversees storage and management of internal paperwork at Oracle Corp. When Lazarus asked him what Oracle's chief, Larry Ellison, would do if boxes of sensitive Oracle information were left at a recycling center, Biega said, "I'm sure I'd lose my job."
In contrast, Indian Consulate officials said that this wouldn't really be considered much of a problem in India, and that they thought the documents would be shredded by the owners of the recycling center. One added that in India and other countries, consulate officials go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they no longer need, a practice frowned upon here in the U.S. An Indian Consulate official did apologize to the general manager of the recycling center for the confusion, then said he was on his way to Best Buy to pick up a shredder, Lazarus reported.
I am going to resist the almost overpowering temptations to castigate or crack wise here – the stakes are, quite frankly, too high for joking. I will, however, cite what I see as some key morals of these regrettable and just plain sad stories.
1. Processes without enforcement procedures are like goals without deadlines – less than useless.
2. No computer should be allowed within 50 feet of an impressionable young person without a full complement of anti-malware software – and processes to enforce such strictures must themselves be revisited and revised regularly.
3. Records, both physical and electronic, require life cycle management processes and policies, which in turn require enforcement and regular review. This is true for every business, individual, school, or other entity that touches any personal or private information. Period.
4. For goodness' sake, shred everything with an address, phone number, or Social Security number on it before disposing of it, even if you are recycling instead of dumping the stuff into a landfill!
It can be really, really easy to over-think BPM, and to create situations of "paralysis by analysis." It can sometimes be just as easy, if not easier, to under-think BPM, or to inadequately apply or enforce important policies or processes. And then, things like the two stories above happen. Got any process-related horror stories (or success stories) you'd like to share? Send'em along, and let's see what kind of dialogue we can muster.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
