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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Company system out of control ALMOST anyone in business will regale you with stories detailing the explosion in email and their rapidly growing workload. The next most important topic of discussion seems to be that of security. As far as I can see there is no management science being applied to either area, and there is little useful data available. A recent survey of senior executives from 1,000 leading companies suggests managers and people are failing to manage their rising workloads effectively. Worse, they are failing to protect themselves and their organisations against the legal liabilities relevant to all forms of corporate communication. Almost half of the companies consulted appear to have no policy on email and Internet usage, let alone their effective management. Nearly half appeared to be ignorant of any legal obligation. Despite the fact that some employees spend up to five hours a day using email or the Internet, companies have almost universally failed to develop clear policies to deal with official and private use. Another worrying point was the widely expressed suspicion that many employees spend several hours a day on personal email, chit-chat, and Web browsing. It appears that the most common misdemeanors include racial and sexual discrimination or harassment, the circulation of "inappropriate" emails, libels, security breaches, and the now commonplace misuse of personal information. So much for the Data Protection Act, Obscene Publications Act, Computer Misuse Act, sexual and racial discrimination laws, breach of copyright and contracts. It is as if people have decided that in the eworld all of this is no longer important or even relevant, or they have just forgotten, or decided to not bother. If there is no effective policing, legal framework, regulation, control or policy mechanism, then why not? Perhaps a more charitable view is to assume that employees are just ignorant of their responsibilities. The fact that a corporate email or website publication can expose them and their company to the due process of law may just have been rendered invisible by the technology. As ever with new technology, there are also new applications and new social habits emerging. For example, the company grapevine is being overtaken and outclassed by the evine, where men turn out to be gossiping far more than women. From a corporate point of view, all of this could be potentially very damaging, especially as it is almost impossible to destroy an email or electronic record. Once information gets out on to a network it tends to end up on multiple hard drives and servers. It is seldom that storage devices are purged, even when equipment is scrapped and sold on. But none of this seems to appear in front of the company main board, and it is typically devolved to the computer or security department. No single director seems to be made responsible, no one owns the problem - it just floats, neglected and unaddressed. At government level there is a plethora of ineffective agencies that are supposed to be responsible, but for the most part the people in control do not, or cannot, use computers. At a policing and legal level the national resources are so minimal there is not a hope of enforcement. Responsibility will therefore increasingly focus on the individual - just like other aspects of the eworld. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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