Twitter and Facebook In Corporations: IT Professionals Are Often The Most Reactionary To Change
By Tom Foremski - June 4, 2009
David Greenfield over at ZDNet, asks: "Why Does IT Hate Facebook and Twitter?"
With as much as the media might talk about the “new enterprise” and “social media” you’d think that IT would be in lock-step with the rest of the business when it came to social networking. But as my recent work with Michael Osterman shows, there’s a big difference between applications that are allowed by organizations and the ones IT professionals consider to be legitimate.
Osterman Research surveyed IT organizations of all sizes from across a wide range of industry. While half of the responding organizations allowed Facebook (Figure 1), only 28 percent of respondents thought the application to be legitimate (Figure 2). The same goes for Twitter, which was allowed by 49.2 percent of the organizations and yet viewed as illegitimate by just 28.3 percent of respondents.
He included these charts:
Applications allowed and not allowed.
Legitimate and not legitimate applications
Foremski's Take: I'm not surprised by the results of this survey. In my experience the IT department within most organizations is the most reactionary group resistant to any change. We've seen it so many times. It is the various other departments within a corporation that have to almost smuggle in new technologies, and then the IT department is gradually dragged kicking and screaming into supporting it internally.
I don't blame them. Every department seeks greater control and extension of their domain. And the natural reaction to new technologies has to be one of suspicion and evaluation. Plus IT departments already have a ton of stuff to do and piling on more projects isn't going to be welcomed.
But it often seems that if things were left up to the IT department we'd all still be working with green text monitors.
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Comments (3)
Set the users free! Let them do their stuff and take accountability for it. When it all goes bottoms up and the branch or department go offline, then they will wise up.
People will always try to find ways around even the most stringent restrictions. Restricting users is akin to treating them like children. It is a business and indeed almost a social necessity today to be somewhat IT literate. Not allowing people to discover the boundaries naturally, will only result in them never taking responsibility for behaving in an acceptable manner in their work environment. I personally give all users administrative rights and have worked in a number of restrictive environments where I could not. In my experience, without fail, the restrictive environments ALWAYS had more problems. For the last 4 years, I have never had to deal with a spyware, virus or malware incident on our internal network and everyone has admin rights to their local machines.
Allowing people to be master's of their own destiny and work tool I feel educates people, more than restrictions. Resulting in a more informed workforce and a harmonious network.
Have we not learnt yet, whatever restrictions are put in place will either be circumvented by the users or the evil doers who are trying to get to them.
China is probably the biggest example of this. As with everything, where there is a will....
Posted: June 4, 2009 2:34 PM
Computers are an asset to the company. Critical infrastructure. Are UPS drivers allowed to install aftermarket equipment in their work trucks? Why should computers be any different?
Managing and maintaining a network is not trivial work. Letting people have free reign over what is essentially a business tool with the capability of crippling an organization may seem like a good idea to some MBA/marketing flunky, but from an engineering standpoint is insane.
Posted: June 5, 2009 11:50 AM
@Gary, the challenge with this is that large corporations are taking a risk by NOT having controls in place. Sure, we can fire the employee that was downloading child porn but then the corporate brand gets dumped on, or we can fire the employee downloading illegal software and music but it's the corporations that pays the fines, sure we fire the employee who use admin rights to install the cool piece of malware but it's the IT folks who now have to spend HOURS and DAYS remediating the environment.
Personally, I find your method LEGALLY negligent.
Posted: June 5, 2009 11:55 AM