From: Mike Eckersley, Head of ICT, North Lincolnshire Homes
Sir – It seems that many housing providers are in the vanguard of business users of social media. This obviously presents challenges for IT teams. While the accepted wisdom once was simply to ‘block everything’, this is clearly not acceptable any longer, particularly with a generation of staff who have grown up with social media and expect to access it wherever they are.
Here at North Lincolnshire Homes, we have developed strategies to deal with the situation and we are making huge use of social media to engage with our customers and other stakeholders. This has been very well received by them all and there is now substantial two-way dialogue which we would not otherwise have.
There are obviously issues around the content of posts on such media and the fact that they tend to be ‘un-moderated’; if posts are deleted there is the risk of allegations of censorship.
However, I am more interested to know if other IT managers have come across any technical issues with the increased corporate use of these sites, such as security and bandwidth use which were always touted as the reasons to prevent access ‘back in the day’.
