Take your Tablet to Work Day?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Company boards are particularly vulnerable to data hacking and information theft, while at the same time board members still tend to rely on paper rather than technology, says a recent survey of information management habits at board level. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of findings; they could be connected, and there could be wider reasons why.

85% of respondents report that board communications are sent unencrypted, the survey finds; almost as many say that they’re stored on personal computers at home or at work, while three quarters agree they get stored on mobile devices as well. Over 60% say that board documents are delivered physically by courier, and when documents are sent electronically (to unsecured personal email addresses as often as not), three quarters of respondents report that board members then print those documents out and carry them about.

The findings come from Thomson Reuters’ 2011 Board Governance Survey (beware, though – they want an awful lot of information out of you before they’ll share the full findings, including your annual revenue) and not surprisingly, TR has solutions for all these potential security hazards, in the form of its BoardLink portal. Nevertheless, other recent developments suggest that the apparently reckless practices the survey exposes could be based on rather more rational decisions than might at first appear.

Take the issue of board members liking to read things on paper. Two studies in the last six months alone – by Forbes magazine (LiveWire coverage here) and the University of Oregon (LiveWire again) suggest that if you read something on paper as opposed to on screen you’re more likely to understand and retain it.

More – a Gartner survey (covered in the same Forbes LiveWire posting) found that if you were going to read it on screen, then doing so on a tablet was a far pleasanter experience than doing it on a laptop. Which leads us neatly to the other rationale for these apparent decisions to play fast and loose with corporate security: IT policies and practices just aren’t keeping up with reality.

This has been exercising technology supplier Dell, whose recent global survey of consumerisation of IT found almost 90% of respondents reporting that employees used personal devices for work purposes. Challenging stuff – but in the circumstances you can’t really blame them.

If employees are “still struggling along with a five-year old XP machine that takes 10 minutes to boot” it’s hardly surprising if they decide to bring their smartphone or tablet into work. That’s the premise behind the Register newsletter’s current survey of IT consumerisation; they’ve had plenty of responses from IT professionals but want to hear from lots more end users – so why not give it a whirl?

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