Social Network Not All Bad for Enterprise
Rebecca Harold outlines common concerns about social networking in her post More Organizations Are Blocking Social Networking Sites To Address Information Security and Privacy Concerns. Most of the concerns center around security and confidentiality but Harold sees this is not a black-or-white issue:
Simply prohibiting all such access may sound like the simplest solution for many organizations, but before prohibiting all access, organizations need to think about how this would impact their personnel...employees' viewpoints about work and their motivations for wanting to help protect the company, customers and information assets. Even sites originally created to make business connections, such as LinkedIn, Spoke and Xing, are adding more functionality that to make them more and more like social networking sites.
Obviously, security is a major concern but the utility of social networking sites has to be balanced with the benefits. I'm in a position now where one of the director's of our group encouraged us to use FaceBook to better understand how to leverage social networking in our enterprise portal developments. We regularly use Web applications now even though when browsers first made their way into business there was concern about people wasting company time surfing the Web. Sure some people slack with the Web but the benefits of Web apps far out weigh the drawbacks from a few abusers. The same goes for social networking in the enterprise.
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