Keeping track of your employees' Web activity is necessary to keep them on task, but monitoring can also cause headaches.
As Internet usage grows, enterprises have strong reasons to monitor employees' online habits. Yet, monitoring can have damaging effects on productivity and morale and can expose enterprises to legal and public relations problems.
The truth of the adage, "Knowledge is power," is clear when the knowledge concerns the Internet usage habits of enterprises.
Monitoring those habits gives enterprises knowledge that has the power to help and hurt the enterprise. Respecting users' privacy while monitoring abuse and enforcing policy requires a delicate balancing act. The optimal balance point can be determined by looking at an enterprise's culture, regulations, technical issues, and return on investment.
To understand the importance of these issues, consider the following common scenarios:
The CEO's first call of the day is from The Wall Street Journal, asking for confirmation of rumours of an upcomingâ€"and highly confidentialâ€"acquisition. How did the leak happen? The reporter got a copy of a Web usage report, probably leaked by someone in the IS department, showing all the top executives browsing a particular vendor's site.
An angry employee files a complaint with the human resources department. Why? Her manager, prompted by reports of a large number of visits to a cancer-related site, just made an inappropriateâ€"and possibly illegalâ€"comment on her health.
