Shock-Collar Social Computing

While visiting a friend several years ago, I decided to go play with his new dog, Lucky, in the back yard.  Lucky got his name because my friend rescued him from a shelter, and Lucky was pretty excited to have some attention.  I threw a tennis ball.  Lucky chased it down and jumped (in apparent excitement) as he brought the ball to me on the concrete patio.  We were doing this for several minutes before my friend came outside and yelled at me.  As it turns out, Lucky wasn’t jumping for joy.  The wire for the invisible border of the electric shock collar was buried just in front of the concrete patio…

In much the same way as my friend wanted Lucky to be able to play freely but stay “inside the lines,” some companies seem to want “shock-collar social computing.”  They want the productivity, innovation and collaboration benefits, but they also fear risk and want some concept of “tight lockdown.”  This thinking tends to show up in three main ways.

1. People are just going to waste time with this.  This is, of course, the same argument that was made against all those other crazy technologies like instant messaging, email, and telephones.  If you have employees that you don’t let use email or telephones, you probably shouldn’t give them a social computing solution either.  For the rest of your employees, social computing tools just extend and enhance these existing communication and collaboration capabilities.  The same mechanisms your company has today to  ensure people are productive apply just as well when social computing is added.  Remember, in a good enterprise social computing solution, no action is anonymous.  Time wasted on social computing is actually more visible than time wasted at the water cooler.


2. People will say foolish or offensive things.  When I hear statements like this, I am often tempted to ask what they think would happen if a whiteboard and markers were suddenly placed in a hallway.  Would the employees start writing foolish and offensive things?  In consumer solutions, a “report abuse” feature often shows up.  But that feature exists because anyone can create an account, and the worst repercussions are typically being banned from the system.  In enterprise social computing systems, it is important that users be able to understand just how visible their actions will be and it is important for users to be able to delete or edit mistakes.  But the idea that giving users a new kind of whiteboard and markers will make them all lose their minds in a fit of electronic profanity is really misplaced.


3. Users will compromise company information.  It’s tough to be an IT security professional.  Every new system looks like a new attack vector.  Much like item 2, if users don’t realize the scope of their statements, it is possible that they will reveal something to someone that they should not.  This is a fair concern for a security professional.  Similarly, if users have to make lots of security decisions, it is a fair signal of possible issues.  But consider the alternative of not having an enterprise system.  For most organizations with whom we’ve spoken, this means that some of the conversations will happen in public systems like Facebook or Twitter.  While it may be possible to block all these avenues, in general, it seems much better to give users a secure system behind the firewall for this kind of communication.

Nearly every company wants improved collaboration.  Some companies spend most of their time and energy thinking about the risk.  They try to dream up systems of “electric borders” that will keep their employees in line while still giving those benefits. 

In reality, the companies that have done the most with social computing typically find very few problems.  The worst issues we’ve heard have been employees not realizing they were uploading a trademarked image when they wanted to share a picture of a product or logo. 

Your knowledge workers are a lot smarter than Lucky.  They have signed employment agreements and probably a few rules of conduct and electronic system use documents as well.  They know that they are measured on their contributions.  They understand that their behavior is reflected in their reviews.

If you are considering a social computing project, you definitely should get your legal, privacy and security people involved early.  But you don’t need shock collars to keep your knowledge workers “inside the lines,” and the real world results of enterprise social computing show that the underlying “shock collar” fears have no real world justification.  And after a couple of weeks, my friend found that Lucky was thrilled to have a loving master and didn’t need his shock collar either.