Social Networking . . . is it like my phone?

It was a year ago I was fortunate to attend an Non Profit CIO Summit held at The Nature Conservancy in Arlington Va. which meets annually for 3 days and holds a series of workshops that focuses on the sharing of ideas, issues we face as a group, common ground solutions and act as a resource.  I love this group, the focus the camaraderie - it's all there.

Chuck Longfield, the founder of Target and now Chief Scientist at Blackbaud has been organizing this group for over 10 years.  He plays a very neutral role and the group really polices itself closely to keep it totally vendor neutral and that's key in all the discussions and sharing of information. 

One of the topics we had discussed last year and still rears it's head every so often as it did this week during a budget discussion was the risk of letting ALL staff have access to Social Network sites and tools. 

The risks:  Staff who don't understand the consequences of clicking on untrusted links or advertisements and the time they could potentially waste doing non productive "networking".

The discussion we had at the last years session summed up nicely the role of IT in how it should address this concern and the level of protection to the infrastructure we should be tasked with while balancing the access of such time intensive tools.

So here goes the summary of the discussion:

Back in the day when we first got a phone on our desk we were told, ". . . the phone is only for business - no personal calls."  Remember those days?  Well maybe you don't - I do.  How long did that last? 

Then along came e-mail and Internet access, almost an exact repeat of expectations - " . . . don't be using email for personal stuff and don't be surfing for anything non business related."  Was the mantra and shouldn't we be monitoring this?  See where this is going?

"Social Networking is that original phone on your desk" - as one my colleagues so eloquently stated.  It's simply another tool to reach out with. 

It's not up to IT to be setting the expectations or monitoring or limiting access, it's the role of management or supervisors to insure their staff are using their time efficiently and productively.  The same person who goofs off and spends all day Social Networking with friends is most likely going to find some other way to goof off or waste their time if that's their nature or what they are allowed to get away with.

As more and more business applications are optimizing API calls to feed information between front end and back of house apps it's important to be diligent and have a united front on the strategies.  But let's not forget, the phone is still the phone.

Besides, I don't want to be the traffic cop, those uniforms and the tight collars?  - I like the night stick and the badge, maybe I can replace the .45 with a water pistol?

Posted via email from Michael's posterous