How to tame the social network at work

They’re a productivity sink and a bandwidth suck. They’re a vector for malware and a gift for corporate spies. They’re a data spill just waiting to happen. And like it or not, they’re already inside your enterprise.

via infoworld.com

A good, well-balanced article about social media in the workplace - an issue I’m grappling with at the day job right now. We’re currently blocking everything, mostly because it’s easier than education, but that really has to change if we’re going to actually move on some of our organisational goals for the next few years. The workforce is also getting younger, which means (warning: massive generalisation) there will be more demand for access to social media. Also, the nature of the work we do means that having some kind of access to social media is almost a mandatory thing.

The article touches on some of my own talking points around this issue: people are already doing it; filters don’t work; use it for good not evil; and educate educate educate. An interesting idea in there, which was actually brought up by a colleague at the day-job, was to create a way to have the users help write their own policy around the use of technology and social media in the enterprise.

(Aside: This article was one of the first times I used Safari’s “Reader” function to read the text without the distraction of ads and page-loads. I liked it.)