Emails a danger in the workplace. Apparently.

A senior representative of leading IT consultancy BearingPoint, Robert Hilliard, has declared that email is a "terrible way to do the majority of business". BearingPoint recommend businesses adopt "collaboration technologies". The core of the argument appears to be that person-to-person communication does not have enough visibility, while a collaborative process is more open and transparent.

I'm not convinced.

The issue of visibility and transparency appears to be driven by legal coverage issues and not underlying issues with the technology itself. Collaboration shifts the focus on to "group communication", maximising the number of people who can see the information development process and spreading the points of blame in turn reducing individual levels of risk. It's not improving communication, it's improving arse coverage.

Mr Hilliard does have a good point when he says:

A person-to-person piece of communication is not visible to anybody else. It is a legal document. You would never consider writing a letter between two organisations without having an appropriately authorised person reviewing it but you don't hesitate to have two junior members of two companies write an informal email to each other that would expose both organisations.

The problem is not one of the tools but of the processes of the operating environment. The solution isn't "collaboration tools" (which he doesn't define but I'm assuming it's things like MediaWiki, Google Docs and Basecamp as examples) which add extra layers of complexity to what should be a simple process of communication. The solution is greater education and simple, clearly defined guidelines on appropriate levels of interaction at an officer-to-officer level.

After all, it's not as if BearingPoint would have a vested interest in promoting introducing collaborative models in favour of existing email infrastructure, now is it?

Just another IT consultancy selflessly promoting more technology as the answer.

envelope originally uploaded to Flickr by timothymorgan. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution 2.0 licence.

Governments behave questionably on Wikipedia. Media pretends to be shocked.

Wikiscanner has been fun, hasn't it? For those who have come in late, Wikiscanner traces the IP addresses of edits to Wikipedia back to home organisations. It's a simple idea really, and it has been marvelous in its execution. All manner of dodgy edits from corporations have floated to the surface (see this collection from Wired for a start) and perhaps least surprisingly, governments have been in the thick of making changes, too.

Australia isn't coming out of this cleanly with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Defence copping some unwanted attention due to the editing activities of its staff. While the SMH article does indicate that most edits were legitimate ones, that still means that some weren't including (according to this Techcrunch article) some hot political issues locally like the Children Overboard affair and mandatory detention.

The biggest surprise about this story? That anyone is surprised at all. Governments do some apparently shifty things some times. More often, individuals with a particular issue to grind will do even shiftier things. Individuals work in Government departments that may or may not do shifty things. Is this news? Yes. Is this a scandal? Not really. Anyone using Wikipedia as a definitive resource will get what's coming to them anyway.

Move along people, there's very little to see here. Some people got caught out while other legitimate Wikipedia users will suffer as access to the resource is restricted. I think the big lesson out of all of this is that anonymity online is something of a myth unless you go to great efforts that are probably disproportionate to what you are trying to achieve anyway.

I think there's something in that for all of us.

All up in your Facebook, Australian style. Is it all just a waste of time?

Facebook has been dragging its feet in the Australian social market since it was opened up to all-comers nearly a year ago. While it's adoption rate in major markets like the US and UK has been pretty impressive, take up hasn't been quite so good here in Australia as I mentioned in this recent post. However, you know something has moved from bleeding edge to man-in-the-street when it gets slammed in the local press as a "$5 billion waste of time".

The press feeding frenzy seems to be based on a press release by web filtering company Surfcontrol and the figure would appear to based on an estimate that 800,000 employees spending one hour per day on Facebook while on company time. I say "seems" and "appears" because I can't find any mention of these details on the Surfcontrol site at all. In fact, if you do find it, let me know as I'm dying to see where these magical figures have come from.

I'll set aside the dream-like quality of the $5 billion (and indeed the "hour per day" and "800,000" as well - perhaps they can all duck out for a quick drink while they wait) as unverifiable and until proven, a bit giggle-worthy. What interests me is the knee-jerk corporate reaction that anyone not spending every spare minute of their day cranking out the company widget is "wasting time".

Ross Dawson on the Trends in Living Networks blog writes:

Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t plenty of company employees working on improving their social lives while they draw a salary.

However, the more important side of the story is that in a knowledge-based economy such as Australia, effective networking is absolutely essential to corporate productivity.

And he's absolutely right.

I am not yet convinced of the usefulness of Facebook in a business setting. This may be because I work in a public administration environment where Facebook-style networking is useful. I would also argue that there is no need for Facebook to waste time here when there are just as many committees, high level working groups and "cross silo information facilitation" sessions that achieve this goal much more successfully than Facebook ever could. It is only a matter time, however, before the right type of social network bursts on to the scene.

Companies that assume that any activity that isn't directed towards achieving the company business plan or (cringe) mission statement is leaving itself open to the risk of falling behind when the wave does hit. Ross also makes an excellent point when he writes:

... in May, usage of Facebook in Australia was around one quarter of that in the US and UK. Australia needs to catch up in its networking, NOT stop in its tracks.

Australia seems woefully under connected in global networks. As national borders become increasingly relegated to antiquated political constructs, ephemeral social networks are going to become more important and an ever growing source of information and even employment. Case in point here is the Finnish social network Jaiku whose system administrator is firmly and happily implanted in New Zealand, half a world and many a timezone away.

Employers need to stop looking at how to prevent their staff from networking on company time and need to start looking at how they can use this energy and activity to their benefit. Do this, or risk being left behind.

Are you part of the Shadow IT?

An evening on the computer
Photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Unhindered by Talent Used under a Creative Commons licence.

I stumbled upon a fascinating article in CIO magazine, regarding the battle between the users and IT in the workplace. I found it relevant both from the perspective of a user in a locked down Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and from the perspective of a sys admin-in-training.

The Shadow IT

The "Shadow IT" are the users who know too much, or just enough to cause problems. They want to use their corporate desktops as they would use their home computers, installing non-approved software. When they want to work on something at home, they'll email it to their personal address rather than try and jump through the hoops required for remote access. If they want someone to collaborate on a document, they'll put it up on Google Docs rather than wait for corporate IT to investigate and maybe one day implement a Sharepoint-style system. They want to use IM and Skype.

Corporate concerns

Of course, the Shadow IT causes its own problems. By installing non-approved software, they could be exposing the corporate network to security breaches. I'm not an expert on firewalls (yet - I hope to be one day) but it seems intuitive to me that they could be opening up holes. Who knows what little nasties are buried in the latest and greatest downloadable piece of freeware? From a compliance perspective, who knows exactly where documents are beings sent, hosted or stored once they leave the corporate network? Who else can access them?

I can understand the attraction in keeping a network locked down. If the network and the SOE are tightly controlled, it makes it much easier to keep it secure. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that if users are busy forming a Shadow IT, scheming to work around the barriers thrown up by IT, there may be shortcomings in the work environment that are hurting efficiency and collaboration. One problem may well be that people have a tendency to treat their work desktop as if they own it, rather than as if it was a corporate resource. When you consider that up to 25% of all computers might be zombies (and this is probably a conservative estimate), letting users install software on their desktops unsupervised is probably not a good thing.

Moving forward

One of the suggestions of the article (and something repeated in the comments attached to the US edition) is that the Shadow IT needs to be brought back in to the fold (or "insourced" as the kids are saying these days). If you find they're using IM all over the place, maybe there's a need for the real-time communication and perhaps a secure solution can be found (although what's wrong with the phone, people?). Can remote access be made more user-friendly and readily accessible? Can Sharepoint be set up, or perhaps IT could roll their own LAMP stack and put it up on the intranet. Most problems do have solutions if you're prepared to look for them. Having said this, I recognise that new features and software also requires tech support. If the IT department doesn't have the resources to provide this support, they're going to do everything they can to lock things down and keep it simple.

Dancing in my own shadow

I'll admit that I'm a bit of a Shadow IT guy. My workspace is fairly limited due to a Government requirement that our network has a defined level of security to maintain its pre-determined national security classification. The basics in the SOE are there, but they are not always the tools I choose to use. For example, I like to listen to music as I work. While Media Player 10 is available, most of my music has been converted to ogg vorbis (or increasingly, m4a) which are not formats that Media Player support. Since I can't install software on my desktop (and I'm okay with that - there's a good reason for it), I burn my music to a DVD along with a copy of a music player that stores itself entirely in the memory and requires no installation to the hard disk at all (I originally was using VLC Portable but it doesn't support gapless playback so I now use XMPlay instead). I keep my GTD mojo flowing using GTDTiddlyWiki with Firefox Portable on my USB thumb drive. In my previous job I used the free version of Basecamp to keep track of my major projects. I like flexibility, but I'm also aware of just how far I can push it.

My shadowiness formed because I have found that corporate IT departments tend to be very inflexible and unreceptive. As an example, I used to use Freemind, a small and free Java-based app, extensively for mind mapping and brain storming. However, when the workplace refreshed the SOE, only a Java runtime was provided instead of a full installation of Java, which meant that Freemind would no longer work. My options were:

1. request an installation of the full Java environment so that I could continue to use this "non-critical" app (unless you are totally incapable of doing your job without it, it's non-critical);


2. request an installation of the mind mapping software that work had spare licences for, if they had any spare licences and if my manager was prepared to approve the several hundred dollars that the licence would cost my unit; or


3. stop using mind mapping software and reduce my effectiveness and functionality.

It's probably no surprise that I went with option 3 because I knew from past experience that "non-critical" apps are dismissed out of hand without consideration and that no one was going to approve several hundreds of dollars of expenditure, especially when I didn't need or even want that level of functionality (I just wanted my simple brain storming tool).

C’mon Corporate, work with me here…

What I would like to see are IT areas prepared to receive requests and at least do a basic analysis on whether or not the request will impact on security, the effectiveness of the network (ie isn't going to choke bandwidth and reduce other people's ability to use the network), cost money or require extensive support. If something passes that test, approve it. Don't just dismiss it out of hand.

Working together, corporate and shadow IT could really be an effective team. The trick is to have the processes in place that allow that conversation to happen in the first place. If I ever become a CIO, that's exactly the kind of environment I want to create.