Your company is more likely to attract the brightest and keep them if your own internal communications reflect the slick, collaborative informality of Web 2.0, with its blogs, wikis and social-networking sites. So there’s a good case for going with the techno-flow rather than clamping down on personal e-mail and Internet use.
There was a brief kerfuffle over the summer about the pernicious effects on office efficiency of Facebook and other social-networking Internet sites. It was all sparked by some rather dodgy research published by a recruitment law firm, which asserted that British businesses were losing 233 million hours every month because feckless young folk were whiling away their working hours e-mailing their mates and swapping amusing videos.
Calls to ban such vile abuse of office equipment were met with outrage from the TUC, which insisted on every worker’s inalienable right to do a bit of cybersocializing on the boss’s time. Shortly afterward, research by Sophos, a company involved in I.T. security, found that half of all businesses actually ban the use of social-networking sites from the workplace.
So should businesses ban all this technical trivia and get staff to knuckle down to their jobs? Or is there a case for going with the flow, and trying to harness the new technologies to the benefit of the business? How you answer might well be determined by your age, but there’s a growing body of opinion favoring a wholehearted adoption of these new collaborative technologies. And much of the I.T. industry sees it as potentially one of the next big growth areas.
It has come about with the rise of Web 2.0, an amalgam of Internet technologies that share a common thread — they all hand over control to the consumer or user to supply material and manage their own networks of…