Internet Access at Work
Conclusion sentence: The use of the Internet for personal purposes during work hours is a significant drain on the productivity of American business, and needs even more thorough analysis and controls than those proposed in the WebSense press release.
Revised Conclusion Sentence: WebSenses' use of exceptionally large figures to communicate lost productivity, including the $178B figure and $5,000 per employee per year are suspect and clearly exaggerated to help their cause of selling more software.
WebSense is guilty of turning a complex issue into a polarized one by attempting to show how much productivity is lost in American businesses by employees using the Internet for personal purposes. The blog entry by Dave Berlind succinctly analyzes and dissects the inflated claims made by WebSense. No doubt to raise shock and anger over the size of the productivity loss, WebSense has inflated the figures and Mr. Berlind punctures the assumptions behind them quite well.
The is a more fundamental and troubling issue in this presentation of lost productivity results on the part of WebSense however. Internet access has been shown to actually increase the level of productivity and learning on the part of employees (Lee, Lee, Kim, 2007) and this is only being exacerbated by the rapid growth of social networking. Clearly there is a middle ground that needs to be reached, as the Internet is a great enabler of learning just as much as a great catalyst for wasting time. it's all in how it is used. WebSense would do better to have applications that didn't just monitor, report and block access to employee sites of interest but rather create a more complex and valuable suite of Web applications that fostered intellectual growth and skills development, guiding employees away from time-wasting sites given their learning goals and closer to content and sites that would help them. The waste of time is relative; if it is time invested in learning and becoming more productive over the long-term, it's actually an investment. WebSense also cannot discount the power of social networks today and their impact on the performance of entire organizations. To cut off access to social networking sites is to increasingly create an isolated organization.
References
Younghwa Lee, Zoonky Lee, Yongbeom Kim. (2007). Understanding Personal Web Usage in Organizations. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 17(1), 75-99. Retrieved October 17, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1275650251).
