Ars Technica posted a great article on the issues surrounding the increased penetration of social networking into the IT workplace. The article offers links to other articles on the subject matter. Well worth spending some time reading.
For me the key takeaway is the fact that it is increasingly hard to manage or control the use of these new social tools in the work place.
While IT departments can attempt to censor social media, Cisco Canada’s Jeff Seifert said it’s “pointless” for IT departments to limit or restrict access to sites such as Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook on corporate networks. With personal phones, tablets, and a myriad of other devices, employees will simply find another way around the block.
This leads to the concussion that corporations need to spend more time educating their workforce about using social networking tools responsibly and less time creating restrictive usage policies, which create antagonism between workers and management. In so doing, they create a better educated workforce who are more capable of making intelligent choices about the information they share online. Whereas a restrictive IT usage polices, can often lead to deceptiveness on the part of workers as they still try to use tools band by corporate policy.
Though in truth, there is no correct answer to the problem of corporate information security in the ever increasingly connected workplace. Sometimes you will simply need to restrict what users can do in the workplace environment. Nonetheless, I think what managers need to do a better job of educating works on why these policies are in place and getting to buy into them.
The bit stream 