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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