In my industry talks on Social Media, I mention the challenges presented to organisations by consumer technologies, so-called “shadow IT”, social media and mobile technologies. A new generation of technology users are used to having leading edge, powerful technologies and are not satisfied with the constraints placed by their employers on their technology use, productivity and flexibility. Therefore, many employees (and particularly younger employees) are getting around corporate controls by using personal email accounts, personal hosting services, online storage, Facebook, blogs, etc. The availability of new, powerful consumer technologies and services is putting increasing pressure on corporate IT departments to keep up.

Recent research commissioned by Mimecast, a UK-based email management company, highlights the risks that organisations face from their employees using non-corporate IT to circumvent controls. Carried out by Loudhouse Research, based in London, England, the research found that knowledgeable employees, familiar with social media and frustrated with corporate controls, are compromising corporate data and intellectual property.

Employees have become dissatisfied with the constraints of corporate email rules and mailbox size limitations. To get around these problems, more and more employees are adopting “a slapdash attitude to company intellectual property (IP)” and use personal email accounts to store corporate information on public servers, outside the control of the organisation. The research found that 85% of under 25s admitted that they send work-related emails or documents to or from personal email accounts.

The “Generation Gmail” research also found that:

• 36% of incoming email to work inboxes is not work related;
• Over 300 work-related emails are sent per person via personal accounts each year;
• Typically around half of these emails contain attachments, meaning that the average employee under 25 will send approximately three emails a week containing corporate IP and potentially sensitive information outside of their corporate environment, and
• Generation Gmail is particularly predisposed to personal email; 52 per cent rated it as better than work email in terms of mailbox size, compared to just 29 per cent of over 55s.

Working in an academic environment, I am very familiar with these challenges and with many more as well. Younger and well-educated people have come to expect that corporate IT services should be as good as what they can get for free on the Internet and they are impatient when this is not the case. However, it is difficult for organisations to respond either quickly enough or with a similar range of technologies to satisfy the expectations of employees and – in academia – students, researchers and academics.

How can corporate IT respond to these challenges? Are policies and procedures enough? What controls should or can be put in place to ensure that corporate information and IP are safeguarded? Is this even possible in the age of the iPhone, 3G, netbooks, tablets, high-capacity storage and other wireless devices?

It seems to me that the response to these challenges must be  try to give users what they expect, no matter how difficult this might seem. Perhaps corporate IT can never be as fast as the giants of the Internet like Facebook, Microsoft and Google but it should look for ways, nevertheless, to provide what it can. This could mean developing a Social Media strategy that identifies how you will provide the communications, collaboration and information sharing technologies that people now expect. Where can you use third parties to deliver services? What partners might you work with? Can you use Facebook or Yammer to enable sharing and collaboration? What about Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress or Typepad for blogging? Are your policies, procedures, controls and security constraints still appropriate for the current environment and expectations of users?

We grapple with these issues every day in Trinity College and, to be truthful, we are probably always going to lag behind our users, because that is the nature of the organisation and it reflects the modern experience of technology innovation. Nevertheless, we have tried to meet expectations where we can. We have adopted Google Mail and Google Docs for our students; we are trialling Yammer as a collaboration platform for the college; we recently completed the rollout of internally-hosted Microsoft Exchange for staff; we are implementing SharePoint 2010 as an enterprise collaboration platform; we offer podcasting services and publish material with iTunes and iTunesU; we are about to release WordPress as a blogging platform for all users; and we use Microsoft Enterprise Project Management for project collaboration. We are also working on defining our needs for XaaS and Cloud Computing.

It is a start, and we know we have a long way to go. But if we can meet the expectations of our users, perhaps we can discourage them from using other technologies that might put the enterprise at risk.

What do you think? Are you dealing with these problems as well? Are you giving your users the technologies they want? What solutions have you found and how have you implemented them? This is a challenge that no organisation can avoid, so how are you approaching it? Please leave a comment and let me know your views.

Finally, Mimecast’s Chief Scientist, Nathaniel Borenstein and Cloud Strategist, Justin Pirie; and CEO of First Base Technologies ISACA, Peter Wood will host a webinar at 10 a.m. GMT on 8 March 2011 with the title ‘Generation Gmail: Is business email at risk?’. You can take part in the seminar at http://mediazone.brighttalk.com/event/infosecurity/79cc30c735-4820-intro?TID=MC.

And very lastly, if you would like to talk to me about the use of Social Media in your organisation, please feel free to contact me.

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Check out Merlin Mann’s 2007 video (courtesy of Google Tech Talks) on getting to “Inbox Zero” by using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) approach. So, can this method work for you? How do you manage your email inbox? Please leave a comment and let me know.

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I live about 200 metres from Baldongan Castle where, in June 1642, a 200-strong garrison of Irish rebels were put to the sword by English Parliamentary forces. The events surrounding the massacre stem from the Irish Rebellion of 1641, an uprising initiated in a time of deteriorating conditions in Ireland, which was under English rule, and a breakdown in relations between the English king, Charles I, and the English parliament. The 1641 rebellion in Ireland was undertaken in support of the king against the parliament, as the Irish feared that they would lose property and status if the powers of the king were limited and parliament prevailed. The parliament included a man who would be remembered in infamy in many parts of Ireland, Oliver Cromwell, prior to his brutal conquest of Ireland, which began in 1649 with the infamous Drogheda Massacre.

Trinity College Dublin has just opened an exhibition in the Long Room of its Old Library entitled ‘Ireland in Turmoil: the 1641 Depositions’ concerning this bloody period in Irish history. The President of Ireland, Mary McAleese opened the exhibition. Also attending was Lord Bannside (formerly Dr. Ian Paisley). A website concerning the period has also been launched. It is a free resource and contains the transcribed and digitised 1641 Depositions, which are witness testimonies of the violent massacres of the 1641 Irish Rebellion. The project was a joint undertaking between Trinity College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Cambridge.

The online publication of the 1641 Depositions was funded by the Irish Research Council of the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), Trinity College Dublin and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)  in the UK. The exhibition ‘Ireland in Turmoil: The 1641 Depositions’ runs until April 3rd 2011 in the Long Room, Old Library, Trinity College Dublin. I’ve spent some hours on the website already and discovered some fascinating information and harrowing tales. I recommend it to readers.

Links:

University of Aberdeen News Release

University of Cambridge News Release

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ICT research in Europe is set to get a major boost in 2011 with the announcement today by the European Commission of a call for proposals for research projects worth 1.2 billion euros.

The projects will include a number of Public Private Partnerships:

The future Internet
ICT for energy efficient buildings
ICT for the fully electric vehicle
ICT for factories of the future.

These four projects have a combined budget of 220 million euros. Details of other budget provisions are available here (PDF).

All documentation is available through the links above. The deadline for submission of proposals is 2 December 2010.

The research funding is part of Europe’s Digital Agenda (launched in May 2010) and is the first significant increase for EU ICT research in more than 10 years. The digital agenda has seven priority areas:

1. Creating a digital Single Market
2. Greater interoperability
3. Boosting Internet trust and security
4. Much faster Internet access
5. More investment in research and development
6. Enhancing digital literacy skills and inclusion and
7. Applying information and communications technologies to address challenges facing society like climate change and the ageing population.

Further details on the Digital Agenda and the seven priority action areas are available here.

The Commission expects that SMEs will benefit from the work programmes funded from the research funding, which will be welcome in the current economic climate.

There are many opportuities for funding available on the EU Information Society website, which is always worth keeping an eye on. Let’s hope the research under these calls is successful and leads to an improvement in the lives of European citizens. We still have a long way to go to catch up on our American and Asian competitors.

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The Twittersphere was loaded tonight with Tweeters complaining about a major failure in Eircom’s DNS service. I have been having ongoing problems with Eirom, which is one of Ireland’s main ISPs, and have little satisfaction in getting my problems resolved. It is clear from tonight’s events that I am not alone. I had to rely on O2′s mobile broadband service for much of the evening.

Thanks to a number of Tweeters, I was referred to OpenDNS, which is a provider of free security and infrastructure services that make the Internet safer through integrated Web content filtering, anti-phishing and DNS. I had to sign up for a free account, which was very easy to do and took just a few minutes. Once this was done, I changed the DNS entries in my broadband router and I was up and running on the web again.

I am still looking forward to the day when I can dispense with Eircom’s “service” all together.

What has your experience with Eircom’s broadband service been? Leave a comment and let me know, though I expect I already know the answer.

I discovered this great programme from Evernote over the weekend. Available in both free and premium editions, it enables users with an Evernote account to store snippets of information, thoughts, pictures, documents, etc on the web. I regularly write notes and post-its to myself but often lose, mislay or simply forget about them. With Evernote, all those notes can now be stored simply and conveniently in one place on the Web for later processing. It is also possible to share your online notes with other Evernote users.

The service is available on a wide range of platforms, which is one of its most attractive features. There is a client for Windows and Mac, a version for the iPhone and other smartphones, a browser service and an email service. This means that it is pretty easy to capture and store a note, picture or document on any device no matter where you are. I tried to install it on my Blackberry but had problems with the Blackberry software. However, it was not a problem, as there is a mobile web version as well and the email service can be used with equal convenience.

The free service is pretty generous. It gives 40Mb of storage a month, which should be plenty to capture and store short notes or a few pictures. You can later move them into your preferred tool or system, or delete them when you have dealt with them. The subscription service costs $5 per month or $45 per year and gives 500 Mb of storage, more options and added security. I’m going to stick to the free service for the moment and see how it goes.

So why not check it out and if you like it, leave a comment and let me know.

johnlawlor.tel

.tel is a new top level domain (TLD), launched between December 2008 and March 2009. Operated by Telnic, a UK-based company, the TLD enables users (organisations and individuals) to publish contact information about themselves in a fairly simple, structured manner. While it is possible to access a .tel domain over the web, the suggested power of the system is that it can be accessed quickly and easily using mobile devices like phones, Blackberries and iPhones; it does not require a web site.

The basic idea behind .tel is that it will become an Internet-based directory, keeping all personal or organisation contact information in one place. For example, if a company changes phone number or address, it would only be necessary to change the entries in their .tel account and publish this information immediately to the Internet. With its “free text” feature, an organisation or individual can also post current information, say, about an upcoming sale or event, or a company profile.

The type of information that can be stored in a .tel account includes personal information such as name, address, hobbies and interests; phone numbers; websites; Flickr sites; Skype and Google accounts, and geolocation information. A user can decide what information to make public and what to show to selected people only (Telfriends), who must also be .tel account holders. Organisations can publish similar information as individuals and, using an internal directory structure, can add specific information, such as details of regional or branch offices. This makes it easier to navigate the .tel site.

Given the type of information that a .tel domain holds: contact information; web sites; identities; location information and searchable keywords, it is a little difficult to see how .tel is a lot different from an informational web page, blog, or OpenID profile. Indeed, I have stored all that type of information on many of my websites, blogs, social media sites, etc. I also set up a VeriSign Personal Information Portal (Beta) that provides much the same information as .tel, although it is web-based. It would also be very easy to set up a single web page on your existing domain with all of the information you want on it; by simply changing details on this page, you could, in theory, achieve the same end as a .tel account. However, Telnic say that the benefit of a .tel account is that a website is not needed and that a user’s account can be accessed easily over mobile devices, using very little bandwidth and low amounts of data transfer. They also suggest that there will be many new applications developed to exploit the features of .tel and that, for this reason, it is a useful service.

They offer ten reasons to use a .tel domain:

1. Controlling your information hub
2. Being part of a global online directory
3. Routing customers to your departments and locations
4. Increasing online discoverability
5. Connecting with customers from any device
6. Having an effective online presence
7. Performing live updates anytime from anywhere
8. Promoting premium rate numbers
9. Generating revenue from generic domain names
10. Driving traffic to e-commerce shops.

Before deciding whether to open a .tel account, I did a little research on the web and in discussion groups to see what the chatter in the community was. I found mixed views on the whole concept. Many companies who were selling domains or services were positive about .tel, while many individuals and IT professionals were more sceptical. Some people felt that it was just another over-hyped product. Concerns have also been expressed about privacy and identity theft.  I share, to a degree, the views of the sceptics and wonder how useful and secure this service will be. Nevertheless, I decided to get my own domains, johnlawlor.tel and lawlor.tel, to test their utility. All of the information I have added to my account (johnlawlor.tel only; lawlor.tel is not completed yet) is already publicly available on the Internet, so I am not too worried about publishing it in the one place. However, I have some concerns about the possibility of suffering an increase in spam or phishing attacks and will monitor my email, in particular, to see if there is an increase in these nuisances.

.tel domains cost from around 10 to 15 euros per year. There is no associated hosting cost, as all .tel accounts are hosted by Telnic as part of the domain registration. It’s very easy to register a domain and I registered mine with Blacknight Solutions in Ireland. If you’d like to have a look, check out http://johnlawlor.tel/.

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