Digital Revolution
According to the security firm Symantec more new malicious programs were created in 2008 than useful programs, something they predicted would increase in 2009. And according to a recent report that surveyed over 200 corporate and government IT professionals, 50 percent expressed concern that so-called Generation Y employees were a security concern primarily because of their tendency to frequent social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
So my question at hand asks…is the problem the individual and their tendencies to use new mediums to communicate, or is it the technology that allows the security holes to be exploited? That poses a dilemma for organizations grappling with the social-networking phenomenon, or as an expert asked “how do you harness all of the good, but avoid the bad?”
Paul Bryan reported in the “Intranet Journal” last year a result of a survey where an oft heard complaint was about low usage of company portals. In his attempt to narrow the causative factors contributing to negative reviews one of the key challenges he found was “often a result of focusing on technical requirements rather than the real-life context of the system.” Sounds like another example of missing the other two elements of good KM…the People and Processes that support the underlying Technology. Give ’em a portal but don’t show them why they need it, how to use it, or help them change their internal procedures to support it. As Maxwell Smart would say, “ah, The Oldest Trick in the Book!”
“The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry”
As I was preparing for what would have been my magnum opus blog entry this week, the firewall on the network provided by the local Directorate of Information Management (DOIM) stopped me dead in my tracks. I was seeking out that one golden nugget to really hammer the nail home on Knowledge Management, but sorry boss, no can do.