At companies with pathological relationships between senior management and IT, the realization that more IT management is needed will come only after a series of crises, some of which may threaten the future of the company.
The markets struggled to cope with financial crises in Asia and Russia in the late 1990s and with the implosion of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, in 1998.
Reflecting on Sony and Zappos as bellwether data loss crises, it seems especially unsettling that, well before the spring of 2011, much better data breach management practices had already been powerfully codified by experts and effectively implemented by corporate victims.