If businesses are calling on CIOs to provide strategic direction, the job should also entail offering insight on technology's role in over-arching objectives, not just specific operations. Increasingly, tools are available to improve interactions with customers, partners and other stakeholders, offering ways to both increase and improve the flow of information.

There are great opportunities to reach out to constituents in a more timely and transparent fashion than in the past, which is a good way to generate trust and loyalty. But anecdotal evidence suggests that this is not the way things are going, either in proactive communication or in reacting to problems. I point you to columns posted last week by authorities knowledgeable in the information flow of businesses and government. 

Scott Bradner, technology security officer at Harvard University, takes a tough look at the way three organizations have handled security problems this year. It's never easy dealing with the fallout from security failures, but addressing them in a timely and forthcoming manner can go a long way toward restoring confidence. Unfortunately, the organizations Bradner cites are not unique in acting slowly when it comes to disclosing problems.

Security company Comodo was breached in March, and as a result a number of U.S. companies ended up with false security certificates, Bradner relates in a column at NetworkWorld. Comodo reportedly took just hours to cancel the fake certificates, but it took a week to notify the public of the breach, Bradner notes.   

Meanwhile, RSA recently was hacked, and it has yet to explain what happened. In an "open letter" to customers online, RSA said that information--some of it related to SecureID products--was extracted from its systems, and that information could "potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack."

As Bradner puts it, this rather vague letter from RSA, "whose very existence depends on trust," doesn't do much to restore confidence: "Because RSA is refusing to actually say what happened and what information was stolen, all RSA customers must assume that everything was compromised and that their assets are hanging out there for the picking."

Bradner's third example lies in a very different context--Boston's "Big Dig" tunnels--but the importance of timeliness and clarity in communicating a problem is no less important. After a light fell from a tunnel ceiling in February, authorities kept the information from the public for more than a month.

The starkest example of failure to provide important information in a forthcoming and timely manner can be seen in the federal government. This is all the more destructive in light of President Obama's extensive rhetoric regarding openness in government. As Charles Ornstein and Hagit Limor, presidents of two of the largest journalism organizations, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post last week, Obama made openness the subject of one of his earliest memos to the agencies. "We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration," he wrote the day after his inauguration.

The administration has used new technologies extensively, posting massive volumes of data online, but that alone does not create an environment of greater transparency, Ornstein and Limor note. In fact, they argue, this government has become perhaps even more restrictive than the former one in terms of making important information available to the public. They relate numerous examples of the information-restrictive environment.

Bradner's call for more openness primarily targets businesses, but I think it applies to all organizations whose constituents include the public: "Timely honesty may be painful, but the pain will likely be far less damaging to [you] than the festering that comes from delay and dishonesty." - Caron