IS YOUR WEB SITE HURTING YOUR COMPANY?

By D.L. Nousen, G.W. Luczynski, P.L. Novak, and D.A. Varley

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland, Washington 99352

Abstract

New electronic publishing technologies, particularly the World-Wide Web, are rapidly displacing traditional paper-based methods. Lower costs, faster turnaround, and access to a much larger and broader audience are among the reasons so many organizations are migrating to electronically published documents. However, the same aspects of this technology that have such great appeal to companies can also make them vulnerable in ways they may not have learned to recognize and manage.

Web publishing is complicating and expanding the roles of operations security and information release professionals as well as communication professionals. The advent of the Web has brought a decentralization of functions that long have been managed and controlled by a single person or group within a company. Because available tools make it easy to create Web sites, anyone and everyone can - and often does - create and publish documents with little or no involvement from corporate communications staff. Likewise, the ease with which any desktop computer can become a Web server makes anyone and everyone a publisher and an information manager. In many cases, the people responsible for these servers are not communications professionals; in nearly all cases, they are not trained in information release or operations security. This situation can put a company's image and its competitive advantage at great risk.
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