Must be something in the bloody water, mate. What is it with Australian firms treating their people like adults rather than babies?
Today Silicon.com reports that GE Commercial is happy to encourage employees to use Facebook, as long as they understand the risks:
The Australian division of GE Commercial Finance is encouraging more than 1,000 staff in its Australian and New Zealand operations to embrace the social networking website as a means of improving staff security practices at work.
GE Commercial Finance’s IT security and risk analyst, Ashley Jones, said he has noticed staff putting far too much information on websites such as Facebook, including where they work and their date of birth – key details he is trying to get staff to be more protective of. By teaching employees to look after their details on social networking sites such as Facebook, GE Commercial is hoping to extend good security practice across the organisation.
This just a dew days after another Aussi
A while ago Dennis Howlett wrote a piece called Facebook for the Enterprise = Facebook, partly based on some thoughts from Jeff Nolan and Jason Wood. It is obvious to me that Facebook has some business value… and as I wrote last week, organisations that block access may find it difficult to recruit the best and brightest.
Thanks for the props James. Problem is that FB seems to be losing its allure. At least for me. Many problems are making it hard work. Perhaps it’s me (probably) but I’d love to see it used as a metaphor and put into enterprise use. Even so, this is a good use case.
Even if it is not facebook, as clearly there will always be a new place people will flock to it clearly highlights the need for organizations to consider that locking things down is not the smartest way forward.
I would say that though as I have seen the benefits inside our group.
Having a set of things to enable people to connect inside as well as outside organizations clearly makes sense