Why del.icio.us is dan.gero.us
Published by Niall Cook July 27th, 2007 in Enterprise bookmarkingIn a very good introduction to Enterprise 2.0, CIO.com (perhaps unwittingly) demonstrates why public social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us are not appropriate and potentially even dangerous as business tools:
Marketing teams could use social bookmarks for competitive analysis to track what a competitor is doing; Sales could use it to learn and share information about targeted companies; knowledge workers could use the technology to track a particular subject such as Exchange Traded Funds or cell phones. What’s more, people can share these lists, and the data lives on even after an employee leaves the company.
Yet how many employees are using them to track sensitive subjects such as these?
12 Responses to “Why del.icio.us is dan.gero.us”
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You are quite right Jon.
Firstly, how many employees are using these tools, period?
Then, how many are using them to put business information into the public domain?
Finally, what are their businesses doing to capitalize on this?
How about this one? A friend of mine works at Citibank in the Investment Banking Group. Their VP of IT not only allows their people to use del.icio.us, but he has people internally training on how to use it. Talk about a potential security threat….and people banking at Citi think their investments are safe.
Yikes - that is scary.
Let me quote a good friend and business owner who dealt with the situation.
“Social bookmarking and media sharing is OK to use as long as it’s for personal stuff and only on your own time.
- You’re not to engage in personal activities (I.E. surfing for pet projects) during work.
- You’re not to publicise or otherwise publicily display any of our internal activities.
- You’re not to publicise or otherwise publicily display any information you recieve to your work email.
- You’re not to publicise or otherwise publicily display any work information you recieve to your private emails.
- You’re not to use your work email for personal activities.
Anyone who fails to follow these simple instructions or otherwise violate our NDA is fired. No exceptions.”
The last I checked, they’ve had no security issues with any Web 2.0 sites.
So it isn’t the tool itself, it’s the people who use it. Anyone can abuse a tool, though that doesn’t invalidate the tool itself.
After all, you could kill someone with a pair of scissors, thought that in no way invalidates their original purpose..
Proper training can mitigate a lot of these problems.