It’s the dirty little un-secret we all know, but don’t want to talk about. Porn is alive and well in the workplace.

A 30-year-old man was charged with possessing child pornography after images allegedly were found on a computer at his workplace at the William J. Wrigley Company. Rory Griffin was charged with one count of possession of child pornography.

According to police officials from the Wrigley Co. notified police that technicians fixing a company computer found images that appeared to be child pornography, (see Wrigley Co. Worker Charged With Child Porn).

I personally know of one major brand ‘beverage’ company where the top three most surfed websites are all porn sites. I’m certain they’re not the only one.

In 1995, Chevron Corp. paid $2.2 million to settle a sexual harassment case brought by employees who were offended by an email titled "25 reasons beer is better than women." -- Combating porn in the workplace.

In 2004, the Internet Watch Foundation, the UK’s child porn watchdog, received 17,255 reports of illegal child images, 20% of which were websites. While more and more legislation is punishing those that indulge, the IWF said some managers feared finding themselves caught up in criminal proceedings.  An IWF survey of 200 firms found 74% of managers would not report guilty staff to the police and 40% would not take steps to discipline or dismiss them.

Changes to the Sexual Offences Act in England provided a conditional defence to protect network managers who need to store potentially illegal images of children as evidence. However, it is only valid if the incident is reported within a set amount of time. The age where a picture of a child is considered illegal has also been raised from 16 to 18.

While there are network programs that can block access to certain websites, or only allow access to certain approved websites, there is really very little that an employer can do to fully block workplace porn. If employees want it, they can get it.

The best approach is to treat employees like adults. Establish acceptable use policies and have employees agree to it. If you suspect that child porn may be downloaded, phone the police. Don’t attempt to do any forensics, call the police right away.

RELATED READING:

Protecting your goods

www.WiredSafety.org

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

One can spend a lot of money on IT. One CEO of an outrageously profitable financial services firm (who shall remain nameless at the risk of losing my head or shares) is known to say, despite the climbing profit, “we spend too much on IT.”

Alas, investing in the future is seen as desirable for some companies. But can we at least control the investment?

“As if bracing for each new technological development isn’t challenging enough, the IT function is further ex­pected to manage and implement these changes in an orderly “best practices” manner to help ensure continu­ity of IT deployment in all appropriate business pro­cesses,” states the Enterprise Management Associates’ white paper Service Management Made Simple For Mid-Sized Organizations. “This approach has ushered in the era of service management, where applications are viewed by end-users as utility-grade services available to authorized users throughout the networked company, rather than as siloed, discrete applications unique to individual users and departments.

The paper, prepared for Raritan, a supplier of solutions for managing IT infrastructure equipment, highlights the key attributes of an effective IT management service strategy:

• Integration – support a breadth of functionality (e.g., security, network management, application performance) from a single management view rather than requiring multiple monitoring tools and interfaces.
• Management of changing environments and conditions – Service management processes detect changes in configurations, new devices, applications and networks, sudden shifts in traffic flow or routing, denial of service attacks and other random or unexpected threats that can create havoc within any IT infrastructure.
• Modular deployment – A modular approach provides the best of both worlds – enabling an integrated, holistic management strategy that can conform to best practices, while enabling flexibility and choice in making management investments. Well-designed modular solutions should also be easy to deploy.
• Resilience and reliability – The design objective of service management best practices is to be adaptive to change, and since they are based on defined standards of performance, functionality and management, they are also highly reliable.

Of course, one of the keys is reporting and alerts including alarms and reporting on time to repair and time between failures.

Ultimately what Raritan and others in this space are selling are command center systems (NOCs) that integrate and monitor your infrastructure (“centralize the management of more than 10,000 devices with only one IP address”).

RELATED READING:

If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck then it’s probably… a duck. But don’t count on a duck to deliver ROI. <Insert expletive and comment about “what the hell is he talking about?!?!>

Aflac is a big brand with a quirky following. Well, they have a quirky mascot in the form of a duck that is their figurehead and advertising spokesperson… errr, spokesduck. You’ve no doubt heard the chortle of the affable duck sounding a little like Donald Duck if he had smoked one too many Cuban cigars (Oops! Of course, I meant to say Dominican or Guatemalan cigars… the kind that don’t fill the coffers of Generalissimo Fidel).

“AFLAC!” goes the familiar bellow. Go ahead play with the duck. Download the sound bite for your own amusement. Make sure you turn it up so that your fellow employees know that you’re busily working on some mission critical project.

Getting to the point… I just read a half decent case study on the Aflac intranet portal. The case study is in fact a sales pitch by BEA Plumtree who implemented their portal product as the platform for the Aflac intranet. But as far as commonly available intranet case studies go, this is not bad. It even has a mock-up of the Aflac portal home page proudly showcasing that ubiquitous, sad, out-of-the-box Plumtree look-and-feel.

Aflac’s Best Practices for Driving Portal Adoption and ROI is the name of the case study and webinar presented by Line 56 and BEA. Sounds encouraging and right to the point – with ROI! Boy, it’s refreshing to find a case study that promotes ROI and ACTUALLY has ROI! Except this ROI case study has no ROI. Nope, no ROI.

It’s really not a bad case study. There is some good process background and a couple of screenshots. But no ROI.

What’s the point I’m trying to make? Ducks make great mascots. No, that’s not it.

ROI is good, very good… if you actually have ROI. ROI stands for return on investment and is a monetary metric based on a formula where the value of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment (value ÷ cost = ROI). It is measured and demonstrated as a percentage of the initial investment (e.g. 95%).

A case study demonstrates a best practice and proves a measure of success. It is not a sales pitch. Beware the ROI case study with no ROI. If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck… it might actually be a sales rep for a portal vendor.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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Some good intranet case studies with ROI:

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

Intranet Insider World Tour: Sodexho USA

Part II - QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

More reading on intranet ROI (with real ROI!!):

Intranet ROI

More than ROI

Intranet ROI (Back Issue)

Measure your efforts

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Stromberg Consulting, part of Ketchum, has issued a report on the 2006 Macro-Trends in Internal Communications.

The author, Cynthia Roy, provides some excellent insight and backs it up. Though some of the cited research raises an eyebrow (27% of adult Americans now read a blog regularly… I doubt that very much.)

Roy cites seven trends that are “shaping the communications landscape”:

1. Democratization of Information
2. Strategic Imperative
3. Employee Engagement
4. Demonstrating ROI
5. Segmentation and Globalization
6. Simplicity
7. The Emerging Trend: Personalization

A solid list and a worthwhile read. One communications trend though that I believe is understated is the advance of technology particularly the intranet/portal and social media such as blogs, wikis and podcasting. Of course, I need not go into too much detail backing up my argument… feel free to surf this site!

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

I don’t blog jokes or joke e-mails. However, this was a real letter to Dr. Laura and it was recently posted on the Internet. It is just too funny not to share with the World. Note: I didn’t write this so don’t flame me!

--

On her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by a U.S. resident, which was posted on the Internet.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have earned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 8:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. ... End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Law and how to follow them.  

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2. The passage clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? - Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

In the past couple of days tech giants Microsoft and Google both made aggressive moves to securing more of your intranet business. Both announcements from the two avowed corporate enemies did not directly involve competitive services, but the indication is clear: the employee audience is an increasingly bigger priority for both.

The Microsoft chiefly targets the health sector – specifically health companies that are looking to bolster their communications and collaboration technology for employees.

Microsoft has launched a new healthcare offer called Knowledge Driven Health Plans, “the company’s shared vision and solutions framework for the health plan industry.”

See Microsoft targets healthcare

Under Microsoft’s vision and solutions framework, health plan employees are able to connect islands of information for improved collaboration and knowledge delivery, driving more informed decisions. The solutions based on this framework span key business areas, including care management to business intelligence, enterprise-wide project management to risk management and risk compliance, and member-centric communications. Industry customers around the world are realizing business success under the Knowledge Driven Health Plans vision and solutions framework.

Horizon Healthcare Services Inc. (Horizon) recently deployed Microsoft BizTalk Server to provide translation and orchestration services for its provider portal applications and HIPAA transactions. With Microsoft’s technology in place, Horizon has achieved improved visibility into transactions, increased first-call resolution of support requests, and it projects a 50 percent reduction in cost of ownership.

In short, Microsoft is repackaging existing business software and solutions for the healthcare sector with an eye to employee collaboration and communications tools.

Google has unveiled two new intranet services that expand on previously announced but scaled-back solutions including the new, smaller, faster Google Mini.

As the Motley Fool put it, “Google is the king of Internet search. Now, it looks like it wants to be the king of intranet search.

See Google on the Inside

Google Mini integrated hardware/software search appliance now searches multiple sites and can help businesses create an instant intranet by searching the contents of shared Windows file systems.

Starting at just $1995, new features for the Mini include:

Access to more, fresher content

• Search across multiple web sites with the ability to create an almost unlimited number of document collections and user interfaces
• Create an instant intranet by directly indexing shared file systems
• Choose between automated continuous crawling to maximize freshness and minimize network traffic, or crawl the entire site on a set schedule
• Faster crawling and query serving, with support for up to 25 queries per second (a 25X increase) for growing websites

The hardware itself is event smaller than the original and now can fit under the desk of your intranet administrator.

What is refreshing is that both companies have spent recent years focusing most of their energy on the Internet, customer-facing space. There appears to be a reinvigorated focus towards the ever-improving and increasingly vital intranet space.