Irwin Lazar and Melanie Turek have several posts on VoiceCon at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. There's a nice counterpoint to Melanie's comments about the "democratization of UC" that Lou D'Ambrosio of Avaya spoke about, posed against the perils of social networking in the enterprise that Irwin blogs about.
Irwin Lazar and Melanie Turek have several posts on VoiceCon at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. There's a nice counterpoint to Melanie's comments about the "democratization of UC" that Lou D'Ambrosio of Avaya spoke about, posed against the perils of social networking in the enterprise that Irwin blogs about.In that social networking session, Fred Knight, Dan York, Irwin and I talked about the tension within the enterprise between letting workers collaborate in a way that works best for them, as against the risk of them knowingly or inadvertently misusing or abusing the tools.
I left that discussion thinking there was no meaningful difference between what's going on now in the enterprise with the public social networking tools and sites, and what happened just a couple of years ago--and continues to happen--with public IM. You just can't stop it.
And the reason you can't stop it is that it's really effective. I'll be the first to admit that my use of Facebook is less than optimal. I don't "live" in Facebook, I don't update my status that often, and so on. But I know people for whom it is the tool of choice.
Instant messaging, on the other hand, is how our organization works. We're a pretty near example of the virtualized, highly mobile organization that is the rule these days, rather than the exception. I don't think we could give it up, and furthermore I can't imagine anyone even attempting to get us to give it up.
So one of the lines that's being blurred has to do with where employees behave. The comparison I made in the session was to general network security: The biggest security threat is things like employees losing their laptops or PDAs, or having data on those devices that shouldn't be there. The challenge isn't to build fail-safe systems, because that's not possible. The challenge is to inculcate in employees a culture of work-appropriate behavior in the online communities that they use.
