Dec 7, 10:07 pm: Embracing technology can stop rogue uses

This paragraph in a recent CIO.com blurb caught my attention:


But there is another market for Google Apps: A growing number of information workers, frustrated by traditional corporate IT systems, have flocked to the consumer version of Google Apps covertly (forming their own “Shadow IT” department). When this happens, Jones notes, companies can put themselves at risk of breaking compliance rules.

“The covert use of Google Apps is almost becoming ubiquitous,” he says. “Companies can try to shut it down, but the reality is the business users will go on using it,” he says. “The implications if you don’t do this in a controlled way are huge.”

Web-based apps are hard to shut down. Sure, you can make it difficult for your users to go there but they are hard to shut down. People do, after all, have home computers.

It’s the same with thinking about blog policies or flickr use. Forbidding it or sticking your head in the sand is just going to mean that people are going to use it without your knowledge and without guidance. And that might end up being very bad for your organization.

So maybe you don’t adopt a particular technology, Google Docs or flickr or WordPress, but maybe you do tell people how and when to use it and then let them. That means that you can really explain why maybe using Google Docs to share membership data via the spreadsheet application. Or why you have to be careful about not getting the faces of your constituency in those flickr photos.

Does anyone have any policies like this to share? Policies that aren’t about full-scale organization wide adoption or blessing but about providing boundaries?

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Marnie Webb  |