Last week at Sogeti we had an interesting meeting about social media services. One topic that came up was the differences that may occur between the services required and provided by companies, and the ways their employees find creative workarounds for them. Since I feel quite strongly about this, it’s worth dedicating this post to it.

One popular example is what to do when there is limited support to share documents with customers or suppliers. With the emergence of a wide range of services around these days, it’s very tempting to simply use your personal dropbox, onedrive or google docs environment. There may even be some that use their personal storage for just-in-case backups because of bad experiences in the past. However, two issues arise.

First of all we have to touch the privacy discussion a bit. What will your data be used for once you store it as a personal user at such a service? Google used to have a policy that the data provided to them could be used in whatever way they saw fit. However, after going through the policies of dropbox, Microsoft and Google they all clearly mention it is and remains your data, and both dropbox and Microsoft claim not to use it for datamining for services such as personalized ads. They all collect data on usage to improve their services, but apparently exclude scanning the contents of your documents.

Second and perhaps most important in this discussion is your corporate policy. Does your company or your customer/supplier have a policy in place that prohibits data from leaving the premises/network? Are there files in your backups that are considered confidential? Did you get an agreement on all parties involved to use this service? Though it is tempting to find a quick fix, know that you are at the receiving end of what I like to call the Collateral Damage Funnel; when you take your own initiative and something does go wrong, you will be held responsible.

I am a very big supporter of using online services for the convenience provided, but always take caution not to go against policies in place. If there is a missing service, it is up to your company to come up with a decent solution. Let them know there is an issue, and an added benefit is that they are made aware of this so they have the chance to improve their support of your operations.