When IT Becomes the Digital Police

There’s a very interesting article in Computerworld this week about the rise of employee monitoring and the sometimes uncomfortable position that IT staffs are put in when they are called upon to manage it.

Employee monitoring comes in many forms now. Web site logging and email scans have evolved into text scanning, keystroke loggers, screen captures, phone call logging and the like. Location tracking can be enabled via company-issued smart phones with GPS capability. Companies are even looking at posts on social networks and blogs, whether done on company time or not.

IT staffers are in the middle of this because they have the tools and the knowledge to make it work. But according to the article, while security specialists consider it to be part of the job, others, like network administrators, say it’s not what they signed up for. Many are uncomfortable with what they say feels like spying on their fellow workers.

A big distinction can be made based on how the monitoring is disclosed to the workforce. If done in secret, I think IT staffs are justified in being concerned. Unless you’ve been hired as a surveillance operative, you have a right to object to being turned into one.

Moreover, if the corporate culture is one in which management feels secret surveillance is both appropriate and necessary, then the problem – and the potential organizational dysfunction – goes deeper than the potential violation of a computer use policy.

Full disclosure of the monitoring program to the workforce makes things a little better organizationally – “you can’t say we didn’t warn you!” – but the discomfort with being in this role will not entirely go away for IT. I think a reasonable (not big-brother-ish) policy, which is fully disclosed (and frequently restated), combined with transparent practices and even-handed enforcement is key.

And ideally, IT staffers should be specialists in administering these programs and practices, and hired with full knowledge that this will be their role. You wouldn’t put an untrained cop on the beat and you shouldn’t put these serious IT tools into the hands of people who are unfamiliar with their use – or unhappy with using them.