I've been a reader of WIRED magazine since it was released back in the early 90's. The April 2007 issue was all about business exposing themselves or as the cover suggests "Get Naked and ..." The articles essentially talk about how business can benefit from this new ultra transparency. It is critical that we understand the fundamental issues underpinning this strategy and while printing the word "Naked" might sell more copies or get your email caught in a SPAM filter, it has little to do with the core factors of change.
Alvin Toffler would probably point to this article and claim that this is yet another transition that must happen to our economy as we move from the assembly line mentality of the industrial past to the software mentality of the information age. He is right and to the people who still look at the future through rival-goods colored glasses, it is going to get really weird.
I'd like to say to the readership of this blog that information technology practices are still being based on the machine models of the industrial age and the removal of these rival-goods glasses is not going to be a painless process. Risk models based on keeping the business from running around naked is going to go the way of the dinosaurs. This change is not technologically driven; it is epistemologically driven.
As I see it, the 'Get Naked' theme of this WIRED issue is entertaining but could be a little misleading. The pattern is not that an outer layer 'thing' is being removed to show an inner layer 'thing' - we are not removing the skin's skin to show skin; the pattern is that for the first time we are seeing the entity for what it truly is and that being a set of processes and not things. The key shift is that the industrial age brought us an epistemological model based on things and nouns, and the information age is NOT about things and nouns but about processes and verbs with a focus on how an object comes in to being.
Businesses today must make the shift from securing "things" to securing "processes that cause things to come in to being". The efforts to take information and force it in to a package that works with our non-rival economy (think DMCA) will not be the dominant strategy. This shift from things to processes or from nouns to verbs has a profound effect on the risk models that exist today. I continue to lead a team that is researching new models based on an economy of non-rival goods.
So when thinking about the nakedness of company X, try not to think in terms of a giant assembly of nouns that together make up an aggregate noun named company X; think about company X as a set of processes Y that at any point in time manifest themselves as company X. The question then become not "What is company X" but "How does company X continuously come in to being". Understanding the latter requires a contructivist epistemology.