Cisco reports lag in social media policies
Jinfo Blog

5th August 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Social media tools are all about connecting and building relationships, but a recent study released by Cisco shows that there is still a lot of nervousness around letting employees engage with sites like Facebook and Twitter on company time (http://digbig.com/5bcdjp). As reported in a post on ReadWriteWeb (http://digbig.com/5bcdjq), concerns about security and lost productivity are causing the biggest headaches, but the companies in Cisco's '2010 Midyear Security Report' - midmarket and enterprise businesses - don't seem inclined to turn their backs on social media either. Cisco's research identifies three major trends at work altering the cyber security landscape: a shift to mobile technology, economic pressures leading to more virtual work, and the demographic shift towards employees comfortable with online collaboration and sharing. Taken together there are more access points than ever to enterprise information assets within an organisation, and a commensurate increase in pressure to manage them appropriately. The report found that 75% of employees surveyed identified online collaboration as critical to their jobs, and 90% said such collaboration makes them more productive. And it appears that they're committed to collaboration, whether or not their employers are: 45% of employees who are in the Millennial generation use social network sites at work, though only 32% say such use is supported by their IT departments. Half of respondents said they ignore company policy prohibiting use of social media tools at least once a week. Of course, some of the collaboration that goes on is truly a waste of corporate resources. Looking at how their customers' employees use Facebook, 7% of them spend an average of 68 minutes/day playing the interactive game FarmVille, and 5% of employees play an average of 52 minutes of MafiaWars each day. Yet only one in seven of the companies surveyed had formal processes in place for using social networks in the workplace, and only one in ten had IT departments directly involved in social media initiatives. What these numbers make clear is that the use of social media within the workplace is already well entrenched, and that prohibiting it is, at best, only an annoyance, not a real deterrent . Cisco recommends that companies first get a handle on how social media is being used internally, followed by a one-two punch of more clearly articulated policies and employee education.

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