New IT tech job: RAT
Why can't employees leave their personal baggage at home? Cubicle farm dwellers don't wave flags declaring their personal oddities physically, but they sure say stupid things in e-mail.
"Ripped from the headlines" as they say are the sordid details of naughty e-mails from a male executive to a female co-worker that became the last straw and got the senior executive fired. Not from a little company, but from Boeing.
E-mail monitoring goes on, and some technical staff members have full access to an incredible display of human weirdness flowing through your company's e-mail servers. Problems, for you personally and your company, gather just over the horizon.
Get permission to send warnings to employees reminding them of e-mail etiquette and actions appropriate during the work day. If your management is proactive and intelligent (good luck) you may instruct employees on how to access personal e-mail via private Web e-mail sites like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google. If your management is typical, wait for step two.
You or your group may become the corporate rats and be forced to report to management. This will be called the Apple rule where paranoid chief executives in black turtlenecks decide to sue every employee and friend of the company who may leak an unannounced product factoid. Once the rat patrol begins, the search scope will go wider and wider and look for personal information.
If forced to review e-mails, try and get management to rule that personal messages stay outside the filtering process. Searching for insider stock tips and upcoming product leaks are one thing, but reporting which accounting supervisor lusts after which traveling salesperson should stay private. They're being stupid, yes, but that particular stupidity won't impact the company.
Don't do anything without written orders, preferably signed by corporate lawyers. If some management sleazeball tries to start a rat patrol off the cuff, wave the Sarbanes-Oxley flag for protection immediately. SOX's goal is to stop that type of activity, and worse, so use if for self-defense if necessary. This may be the only time SOX actually helps a technical person, so enjoy it. Reading private e-mails will forever color the way you look at coworkers, so resist strenuously.
ITworld.com, Enterprise Networking
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