Another great Stowe Boyd interview - this one with Carl Tyler of Instant Technologies. They discuss instant messaging (IM) and guidelines that companies should have for its use.
I won't quote the guidelines here - go read them, but I did want to point out one interesting comment Carl made:
There are a few things that I consider useful if not essential for an organization to be "real-time". The first has to be the mindset of the management within the company. If a company doesn't have a trust in their employees to do their job, then an untrusting management can create issues, especially when they walk down the corridor and see people IMing each other.A very interesting comment, because I don't think most businesses, especially those that aren't directly involved in creating or manipulating technology, get this point.
I tried to get the point across to upper management when working for a printing company with plants in two different cities that IM could actually be useful. There are times when a quick question, or a quick request for a file, is all that is needed. All management could picture was employees goofing off. (For the same reason they blocked all internet sites. To access a site you needed, it had to be manually added to the firewall white list. Grrrr)
