Legal risks in organisations

In 2007, I started working for an organisation called Kmart. I don’t find it a bad place to work at. I have learnt a number of new things since I began working there such as how to develop photos. Kmart is a discount department store chain that was founded and opened in Australia in 1969. However, it was founded firstly in other parts of the world in 1899 as the S. S. Kresge Company, and it wasn’t until 1962 that it was founded as Kmart.  

Like many organisations, there are some risks that Kmart have. Since Kmart has a Facebook page, there is the risk of the members of that page sharing confidential information such as prices for the certain items that Kmart sells on the shelves. Once this information is shared there is the risk of it leaking out into the facebook community and this way the people that see the leaked information can compare prices to other stores and see if Kmart are more expensive than other stores or not. This could cause less sales for Kmart if people find out that they are more expensive than other retail stores over Facebook.

Another risk that could have affect on Kmart is people violating their trademark. The trademark can be used on social networking sites such as their Facebook page for example. If people comment on their Facebook page, they may think that it is Kmart’s real website if their trademark is on it, when actually it isn’t their real website. This is caused by people putting too much information about the organisation on Kmart’s Facebook page.

Kmart could also witness cyber-bullying within the organisation. For example, there could be a situation where two or more employees could start bullying each other while they are at work. This could then grow into something more and then the two employees could then start to bully each other using the Kmart social networking page.

The last risk I would like to discuss is the risk of hurting the organisation’s reputation. An example of this is if an employee goes to work at Kmart and has a really bad shift. This could be caused by something as little as them getting in trouble by their manager for doing the wrong thing during the shift or having to do something the employee doesn’t want to do. After the shift the employee then goes home and posts a status update on their Facebook profile explaining to everybody how annoyed they are with Kmart and their staff. This is a risk for Kmart because everybody on Facebook can read the employee’s status update and think less of Kmart for not treating their employees with the proper respect. This could then also lead to dismissal for that employee. 

So as you can see from what I have discussed above, there are many risks that an organisation could have. Kmart is just an example of one company that these risks could occur for, and the risks discussed above are only a few of them.

Enterprise 2.0 – Benefits and Risks

After having a read of some different case studies about Enterprise 2.0, I found a few that were quite interesting. Each case study that I looked at explains how some applications bring benefits and risks to people and within the organisations that use such applications.

I would first like to start out by outlining a couple of the benefits I’ve found throughout the case studies. One example is moving to green development. Placemaking announced an organisation-wide commitment to sustainable development. After this, many webpages started to be created and discussions began on the topics of best practices in sustainability and resources for green development. With these online discussions taking place, this was helping the Placemaking organisation think about the sustainability and how any problems related to it can be resolved.

Another example of a benefit I came across was the one where Mike Hardigan, one of the Placemaking project managers, managed to save $500,000 on a $2 million project. He then created a page referring to his experience and then started receiving comments and questions from other project managers. As Mike continued to address their comments answering their questions and posting photos of the finished project, this caused other construction managers to use the technique on future jobs. But all in all, that was a great saving. Both of these examples of benefits are very helpful to the companies as they help the companies think about what they are doing and everyone has a chance to share their own opinion.

 Now I will discuss a couple of risks that are in Enterprise 2.0 related to web 2.0 tools. For example, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter contain security risks. Many people worry about losing control of the information they put on the site, because there is always the risk of compromising sensitive data and stepping into security breaches along the way. Then come the risks of malware infections as incoming risks and data leakage as outgoing risks in these social networking sites as well.

Reliability of information is another risk that comes into play when referring to Enterprise 2.0. There could be hackers that could claim to be somebody else from a company and therefore the reliability of information would not be good in this situation.

https://www.socialtext.net/cases2/index.cgi?intrawest_wiki_intranet

http://www.saastream.com/my_weblog/2008/02/enterprise-20-f.html

Web 2.0

I think Web 2.0 is quite handy. It helps assist me with my personal productivity in ways that once weren’t possible. By social networking and using services such as Twitter, people can keep in contact with distant relatives and friends by telling them what they are up to in their lives and how they are going. Wikis are also a useful tool for people to update a document or web page and share relevant information with each other. Podcasting is another good way to help people with their daily personal productivity. Instead of waiting for a certain time for a tv show to come on tv, people can just grab the podcast and watch it at their own pace and the show will keep updating for them, making it almost impossible for anybody to miss a certain show that they like. Those are the things that I think are pretty cool about Web 2.0. I might give podcasting and twitter a go now and see for myself how good they are.

Insights on Blogging

I think blogging is a good way to share your own thoughts with the world. If you have a certain opinion on a specific topic such as politics or the latest sporting news for example, a blog would be a good place to share those opinions to see what other people around the world think about those topics. It would be useful to me when I have something on my mind and I just want to voice my thoughts to nobody in particular to see what feedback and what responses I get in return.

Sacha Chua seems to be keeping her blogs about each topic in separate archives so that when the public view her website, they can look at all of the topics her blogs are about and read her blogs, depending on what topic the person on her website is interested in. She also displays her new blog posts on the homepage of her website and this is the way she increases the awareness of her activities to the public.

Below are some examples of Sacha’s work related to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0…

http://sachachua.com/blog/category/web-20/

http://sachachua.com/blog/category/enterprise20/

Enjoy!