There's an inherent contradiction in IT departments deciding to ban Skype, Facebook and Hotmail as organisations limit avenues for information leaks, an Integ survey found. Skype banned by IT departments: survey

Four in 10 of the 233 respondents surveyed at the recent AusCERT conference said they were blocking the popular internet telephone service, while a third blocked Facebook and Hotmail.

Hosted audio conferencing was also blocked by 13 percent of those surveyed.

[...] Nearly half said they provided workers with an internal instant messaging tool, half provided collaboration tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint, and more than a quarter had their own blogging software.

"Organisations are keen to keep the elements of [popular social networking] tools that have business use in their internal environments," said Integ chief Ian Poole.

It no doubt sounds good to the people who run big IT departments because email is the same, whether you use Hotmail or Eudora or Outlook to get it. But the elements of social networking tools that they can keep are the ones that don't matter.

What matters with those tools is not the interface but the networks that they are connected to and, because most of the tools don't talk to each other, by definition, any tool that is banned removes all its users from the conversation.

People in a given enterprise can talk to each other in many ways, including at the water cooler, but its the conversations with people outside the organisation such as topic experts or clients that are making the difference to conencted organisations.

How does your organisation deal with these tools? Does it have a policy, how well is it implemented? What are the effects of the way you do this stuff?

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