A Leeds bathroom and bedroom furniture manufacturer aims to free up
hours of management time by rolling out software to police Internet
use by staff.
Managers and IT staff at the Symphony Group spend up to four hours
a week checking log files to ensure the company's 250 workers are
using the Web for work-related activities only.
As well as wasting company time, misuse of e-mail and the Internet
can expose business to legal risks through defamatory or obscene
content.
Although Symphony's Internet policy bars staff from using the Web
to look at shopping, football, or adult sites, enforcing the rules
can take up a lot of management time, said IT services manager
Craig Monument.
"The only way to enforce the policy is to be reactive. We log all
Web accesses and key strokes. We have to manually trawl through the
log files or use a Unix script to summarise them," he said.
It can take up to five hours of processing time each week to
produce a 250-page summary of the log files and another four hours
for IT staff to go through it.
In practice, this means scanning through the text for words that
could indicate that staff have been looking at adult sites. Often
there is not time to check whether staff have been looking at other
non-work related sites.
Monument said, "The policy is that the Web is for business use. The
only way to enforce the policy is reactively - someone noticing
that someone is looking at a site they shouldn't be. It's difficult
to enforce for 250 staff."
The group's IT department has been testing Baltimore's Websweeper
software, which automatically blocks non-work related sites, since
October and plans to install it across the company.
Monument said, "We can't quantify the return on investment, but the
reduction in administration and processing time will be
significant."
Symphony has been using the Mailsweeper software package for two
years. The package filters out program and picture files and other
non-work related extensions.
"Symphony has a strict policy. E-mail is for business use only.
Non-document type attachments are not allowed. Exe files, pictures
and games are filtered out and the IT department alerted they are
coming in," said Monument.
The group plans to invest in a HP dual Pentium 3 server to run the
Web monitoring software.