Sex has been prominent among the matters on CW360.com readers'
minds of late. In particular, the issue of whether employers should
sack staff for taking a peek at erotica on the Internet during
working hours.
Here are some of the emails we've received in response to
Simon Moores' piece on the subject.
"A major point about all this is: What is porn? And can you back
that up in front of a tribunal?
After all, show any large, mixed group of people an image and ask
them if it is art or pornography and you are going to get a split.
It is a split that is further antagonised by having it described in
employment contracts and staff handbooks as 'inappropriate
content'.
Inappropriate to what and to whom? After all, we have heard
rumblings from the government that Web connections should be made
available to employees for personal use, so you can't claim it is
inappropriate in terms of it being unrelated to work, and it comes
back to it being a subjective choice.
After all, how is a poor Web-browsing employee expected to guess at
the tastes of their employer? It just won't hold water as a
justifiable case for dismissal, as the employer would be claiming
that staff should have to guess if something will be inappropriate
to somebody else - before they see it! That wouldn't hold water at
an industrial tribunal.
I fear that the only way to enforce this is if the images are
e-mailed or shown deliberately to a co-worker with a clearly
identifiable intent to harass or embarrass, otherwise a sacking
could put the employer up against the wall in front of a
tribunal."
Ian Brown
"The receipt of porn is unavoidable and preventing
the rarer cases of windows suddenly sprouting from an innocuous
link are difficult. So surely the case should be that a firm lays
down a policy that if staff receive porn in their mail, then it is
immediately deleted and not forwarded on to their jokelist etc.
And if the 'porn storm' occurs, then there is a separate email box,
eg. inappropriate@anyfirm. The hyperlink to the original site is
copied into a mail and sent to this box. This can then be checked
should HR become involved and the individual absolved.
If the correct policies are in place then the individual should
carry the can for their own actions. This could follow along the
same rules as Health and Safety where everybody's safety or
'reputation' lies in everybody's hands. I know it's an ideal...but
it might just work."
Nick Caton
"If I pay for the hardware, the software, the connection
and the staff salaries, I decide what is permissible. I cannot see
why anyone should have a problem with that."
David Walker
Of ignorance and e-government
Before anyone gets
the idea that CW360.com readers are obsessed with sex, let's pass
quickly to e-mails on to the almost as thorny subject of
e-government in response to another
Thought for the day piece by Simon
Moores
"E-government, like education, the health service and policing, is
administered by people who do not understand it and, like the
others, will go absolutely nowhere. The Civil Service does not have
the nuts and bolts experience to make a success of any project
and is interested only in perpetuating itself.
Nothing will change, of course, because government is all about you
scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."
Cyril Smith
"E-government is an agenda that needed implementing.
Although it will have many more pilots and failed projects, in the
scope of its overall objectives it will be cost effective and allow
government, national and local, to be at least seen to have a more
open-door policy to the citizen.
If the projects are carried out by competent project managers and
IT managers from councils that understand the objectives, we will
find that costs will fall and the failed projects will become fewer
and fewer.
Too many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon without an
understanding of the differences between the commercial sector and
the public sector, so instead of having the e-government agenda at
the root of their projects, they have money."
Paul Bliss
Is .net the answer?
Ovum analyst
Gary Barnett's enthusiasm for Microsoft's Web services
technology was clearly not shared by everybody.
"Gary Barnett makes some bold claims, but fails to back up any of
these with facts. That Visual Studio is a good IDE for developing
Web services is irrelevant. Enterprise application decisions are
not based on IDEs.
Microsoft has not even shipped its .net Server yet. As for J2EE,
here's a secret that many advocates of Web services don't want
anyone to realise: J2EE already provided all the tools for Web
services before they were called Web services.
Sun has provided a Web Services SDK,which can be easily downloaded
from
www.java.sun.com,
but it just wraps a bow around technologies that have been
available for more than three years now: XML, RMI, JNDI, HTTP, etc.
If you want more integrated packages, Oracle 9i Jdeveloper is one
of many Java IDEs to provide wizards for automating the creation of
Web Services. Oracle and BEA also make nice portal products that
provide sophisticated ways to tie Web Services together in a
consistent manner.
This is something that Microsoft has not addressed because of its
refusal to work with non-Microsoft technologies, although there are
third-party products like Plum Tree that aid in creating portals
using the .net platform.
Sun and others may have been slow to respond to .net, but that was
probably because Microsoft didn't introduce anything they didn't
already have.
Web services are more of a marketing term than a technological one,
and it is part of a marketing campaign that Microsoft is indeed in
the lead."
Michael Galpin
"Who cares anyway? Less than 2% of businesses are bothering with
Web services at all, according to reports in Computer Weekly over
the past few weeks.
Web services are nothing but hype, promoted mainly by Microsoft, in
its search for the Holy Grail of continuing revenue streams to
replace the stagnating new PC business.
Anyone who wants to buy into .net, given the current state of play
regarding security and stability, should think twice."
Mike Mitchell