Information Controls on Intranet blogs - Why no freedom is no control
Many company executives feel that if they give too much latitude to their employees things can seriously ran out of control. Sensationalist stories about bloggers blasting out nasty secrets of executives or politicians only add to this fear. If the water cooler conversation and hallway rumor mill is bad enough, why should we give employees the megaphone to amplify this?
The answer is relatively simple and contradictory by itself. You cannot control what employees publish to the outside world using the Internet. It doesn’t matter if it is via blog, e-mail or any other type of electronic media, you simply cannot the flow of information 100%. Let’s picture the following: an employee wants to blast a confidential e-mail into the Internet. The employee can simple take his laptop home, cut and paste the e-mail into his home PC via a USB drive and then publish it via a blog or an e-mail under an anonymously opened account. And trying to track closely these types of activities can be even more costly than a leak of information. As the recent case from the former HP Chairman Patricia Dunn illustrates, an aggressive tracking of information flows is likely to either border with illegal activities or at the very least damage your reputation greatly.
If you cannot control information flows you have to make sure that you build a proper environment for those flows to take place formally. Allow people to communicate as freely as possible within the work environment. Allow them to express freely so they can tell you how they are seeing the organization, the market and your competitors without any sugar coating. You should have some filters placed, but those filters should be limited to the ethical principles of the company. Hate-speech, racism, discrimination, harassment and other types of behaviors should be placed out of the fomal dialogue. However criticism, even criticism to the top executives of the company should be allowed. Managed appropiately, blogs and other types of collaborative tools can be a wonderful thermometer of organizational climate.
