Enterprise 2.0 Policies

Please add examples and/or links of organizational policies that you think would be beneficial to include.

Table of Contents

Overview

Compiled below are policy considerations when integrating/launching Enterprise 2.0 applications within your organization. Please contribute your ideas if you have additional examples and resources to share.

Company examples from HR Magazine

Response by Janice Keeler, jkeelersla@sbcglobal.net, SLA KM member: There are some examples of companies using these tools in "Social networking at the office: are public sites the way to go? Or does your enterprise need more control?" in HR Magazine, March 2008. I suppose you could call the people quoted and ask explicitly about policies if you felt moved to go that far.

Examples and considerations pulled from HR Magazine

• Serena Software (800 employees in 29 offices in 14 countries): "Facebook Fridays" - CEO Jeremy Burton: "Social networking tools like Facebook can bring us back together, help us get to know each other as people, help us understand our business and our products, and help us better serve our customers." Build trust through micro-interactions; developing friendships and trust through a virtual water cooler. Adopted/approve the use of Facebook instead of an in-house solution; keeps it less formal. Monitors total use to determine time drain: 90% of staff with profiles/less than 10 minutes per week. Believes that if you make your staff happier, foster collaboration, you'll create a more productive environment.
• Nestle USA: Aims to breakdown functional and location-based silos. Created a social network inside its firewall.
• CIA and TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications LLC: Marketing jobs via Facebook (even though federal gov't blocks access from work).
• Dow: "Alumni Network" (internal solution) - accessible to employees, former employees, and alumni. Taps the network when need to fill short-term assignments, rehires.
• Siemens Corp.: Internal blogging; uses Facebook as an information social network. Focus is on making employees more productive, collaborative, and happy.
• Determine whether a public site as the corporate social network would be preferable to buying a commercial product that offers similar functions but with the added protection of command-and-control features within the corporate firewall.

Policies

The following policies may already exist within your organization and could relate OR be slightly modified to include Enterprise 2.0 tools:

• Code of conduct applied on the social networking sites.
• Communication and confidentiality policies.
• Governance and control.
• Enterprise risk management about proprietary information leaking out.
• Establish a handful of "ground rules" up front (e.g., not to be used as a dating service).

Key business partners to involve

• Legal
• Human Resources

Federal Reserve Bank

Response by Diane Mogren, DA.Mogren@clev.frb.org, Research Librarian, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland: Our stance, so far, is that existing communication policies and guidelines already cover these uses. In APQC's recent study "The Role of Evolving Technologies: Accelerating Collaboration and Knowledge Transfer" (which is a long way of saying "Web 2.0"), one of the major themes from the best practice companies is that additional policies are not needed.

IBM

IBM's business conduct guidelines

• 3.5 Protecting IBM's assets: IBM has a large variety of assets. Many are of great value to IBM's competitiveness and success as a business. They include our physical assets and our extremely valuable proprietary information, such as IBM's intellectual property and IBM confidential information. Protecting all of these assets is critical. Their loss, theft or misuse jeopardizes the future of IBM. Etc.

• 3.5.2 IBM information and Communication system: IBM's information and communication systems, including IBM connections to the Internet, are vital to IBM's business; you should only use them for appropriate purposes. You can use them for conducting IBM business or for other incidental purposes authorized by your management or by applicable IBM guidelines.

IBM social computing guidelines

• As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning---between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem.
• Individual interactions representing masses of communication
• Responsible involvement
• Identify yourself

Forrester research

Excerpts from "Walking the Fine Line Between Chaos and Control in the World of Enterprise Web 2.0" by Rob Koplowitz and Erica Driver (February 2008).
The key to neutralizing the issues that generally impede adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is to understand usage patterns and guide people to the right tool at the right time. Although people can generally be trusted to conduct themselves appropriately when representing their organization, as long as they know what appropriate is, don't assume that they'll understand all the nuances associated with system design. In many instances, you'll need to provide people with information about sanctioned options that are designed to serve the needs of an enterprise and complement or replace the use of public systems. Enterprise sanctioned Web 2.0 solutions address requirements like:

• Maintaining confidential information. Maintaining security remains a primary concern of I&KM pros. Web 2.0 tools are well suited to many enterprise content generation and communication needs as long as security can be assured, which unfortunately is sometimes not the case.
• Privacy. Maintaining employee and customer private information is a legal imperative, especially when the information is financial or health-related, or you are in Europe. If any content generated contains private information, you'll need to be able to assure that the information will not be accessed by anyone who is not authorized.
• *Regulatory compliance and legal discovery. In some cases, laws require that all content related to particular topics (e.g., stock trades, patient healthcare records, financial transactions) be retained as a record for a stated period of time. In other cases, organizations need to keep information around just as long as is needed in case of legal action. Blog and wiki tools that are part of or integrated with enterprise content management (ECM) systems can treat blog and wiki content as just another form of content to be searched and managed.

The value of working socially has changed the face of the Web, and of work. The opportunity to change the landscape of work with Web 2.0 is real, but it's important to:

• Create and publicize corporate policy for using Web 2.0 tools. Make policies for blogging, wikis, virtual worlds, and so forth part of the new hire kit. Make the entire workforce sign a form saying they have read and agree with the policy. Hold brief Web conferences and brown bag lunches to coach people on how and why to use the technologies and how to stay within policy.
• Ensure that employees understand public and private usage. Assuming that your organization chooses to allow access to public services for external social networking, and provides a sanctioned, secure system for internal networking, ensure that employees understand what is appropriate for each system. In instances in which the same product will serve both requirements, be perfectly clear about when information will be visible outside the organization.
• Give the policies teeth. Make the consequences of non-compliance perfectly clear. Sharing secure or private information externally must result in consequences appropriate to your organization.
• Piggyback on existing corporate policies whenever possible. Rather than create new policies, refer people to existing policies for intellectual property protection, non-competition, responsibilities as an employee of a public company, and so forth. Policies regarding appropriate use of email, internally and externally, will be particularly applicable.

Additional links

• Beating a Dead Horse into the Ground - Web 2.0 is Coming Back to Reality
• The Role of Evolving Technologies: Accelerating Collaboration and Knowledge Transfer
• Social software policies