John Arlidge and Jamie Doward
The Internet, once dubbed the Wild West of the 21st century, is getting its first taste of the law: an electronic sheriff is surfing cyberspace. Big firms, which are losing up to 3-million each a year as workers surf the Web looking for new jobs and downloading pornography, are set to spend hundreds of millions of pounds spying on staff.
One in three British companies already bans employees from casual surfing or sending personal e-mails, but firms are now installing tracking systems to keep an electronic eye on workers. More than 200- million will be spent on surveillance systems over the next five years, a report released this week by the International Data Corporation reveals.
JSB, a United Kingdom-based software company that makes the best-selling SurfControl `Sheriff’ software, which logs what staff have been looking at and blocks out undesirable websites, predicts sales will rise 60% in five years.
“If your business is on the Internet employees will go where they are not supposed to. Few companies have a proper policing system but it’s coming,” says Simon Moores, chair of the research group which advises companies on Internet solutions.
The computer security organisation Infosec says that the average office worker wastes at least 30 minutes a day surfing the Web. Pornography is the number one attraction, although few companies take the issue seriously.
“They need to see that it’s not a sex problem, it’s a business problem,” Moores says. Among leading companies, up to 40% of Internet traffic is devoted to sex.
Workers are also spending more of their time figuring out how to spend their salaries, rather than earning them. Most worrying for bosses is research which shows that firms are effectively subsidising their employees’s hunt for new jobs. The market for online jobs will exceed 1- billion and account for 20% of all classified advertising employment budgets by 2003.
According to Moores, 12% of a company’s wage bill is lost if its employees each spend one hour a day browsing the Internet. Infosec estimates that a company with 1 000 employees will lose up to 2,5-million a year.
To make matters worse, most employees are suffering from information overload. According to a Gallup survey last week, the average UK office worker now receives 171 messages on an average day. Almost 50% of workers are interrupted six times or more an hour.