Internet Resource Management - Competing Philosophies

Competing Philosophies

There are three competing philosophies of Internet resource management:

• spying on employee without their knowledge, and cracking down on a recalcitrant whenever she/he does anything wrong online (the underlying philosophy of eTelemetry's METRON appliance);

• filter out (censor) all the sites that would not be useful to an employee while doing business things on a workplace computer (Secure Computing's gateway security, SurfControl Enterprise Protection Suite, and Websense enterprise)

• a self-management approach where employees are given an account, and in that account it tallies total time on the Internet, activity by protocol, and policies required of the company (visionGateway's INTERScepter)

Spying and censoring have huge drawbacks. Spying creates a rift between employers and employees and does nothing for morale in an organization. After the first two or three examples of employees being "caught out" the required effects of spying reduce as does employee ingenuity to "get around" being spied upon.

Although censoring tools enjoy majority market share, censoring has major drawbacks; the main filtering database can be a bottleneck when employees are working, and also a database of filtered sites is near impossible to keep up to date because there are thousands of sites a day that spring up as new, and it is near impossible for those sites to be viewed by staff to put on the blacklist. Machine listing of sites on filters is not a perfect science and a lot of good sites are wrongly filtered out.

A self-management approach has fewer drawbacks, however, management would need to play an active part in reviewing with employees their goals for the month and dutifully revisit with each staff member how they are progressing in meeting company goals of Internet use.