An IT lesson from Anonymous: Even lawless groups need rules

Anonymous’ global cyberwar on ISIS — which we recently noted has the potential for undercutting the terror group’s recruitment and fundraising efforts by making social media useless for it — has been running into some structural problems. Mostly, it involves volunteer supporters going off in different directions and thereby diluting the overall mission.

But the problems that Anonymous has been having in its ISIS war offer some good lessons for enterprise IT. IT’s equivalent of lawlessness involves independent workgroups, the cloud, open source and crowdsourcing. The great connections and crowd power that the Internet has enabled allow for great things, but the very elements that create this power make it difficult to control.

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