“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan

If you’ve been a reader of Express Computer right from its beginnings in the early nineties, you’d know that we were the first publication in India to get clued in to the Internet, in terms of utilising its vast resources as a reference repository to help enrich our content. Those were the days when Usenet, Gopher, Veronica, Archie and Lynx ruled the roost. We were among the privileged few outside academia who were granted access to the Net via the NCST servers on ERNET. And we used it wisely. For instance, I remember being in frequent touch with prominent security experts through the ‘Risks Forum’ on Usenet—it helped make one of our early special issues on Data Security a real blockbuster.

We were also the first to introduce a regular column focused on the potential of the Internet. It went under the quaint name ‘Internauting’, and was written by Rajesh Jain, the man destined to become India’s first domestic dotcom billionaire when years later in November 1999 he sold his Indiaworld websites to Satyam Infoway for Rs 499 crore ($115 million)—an event that heralded the official arrival of the dotcom bubble into the country.

Back then, surfing the Net was an arduous task, what with engaged tones, dropped carriers and minuscule bandwidth. Even so, the huge value addition that accrued for our newsmagazine—through being in touch with global tech doyens via Usenet and e-mail—made it all worthwhile.

Things are different now. We have much more bandwidth because of leased lines; and most everyone’s connected all the time, with a couple of extra dial-up connections thrown in for emergencies as well. Our internal communications across the country are efficient and cost-effective via e-mail, many of our external interviews are conducted wholly on e-mail, the Web is the ultimate reference resource, etc, etc. Indeed, it’s impossible to imagine running a publication like Express Computer without always-on Net connectivity.

But there’s a price to pay. It’s a dilemma being faced by companies all over the world today. Sure the Net adds a heck of a lot of value, but there’s a flip side as well: employees check professional and personal e-mail a gazillion times a day and feel compelled to reply to each one immediately; although Instant Messenger is a great communications tool, it’s also an instant and constant distraction, in addition to being a security nightmare and a bandwidth hog when employees connect to high-traffic chat rooms; blatant downloads of streaming audio and video by idle staff make the Web crawl for others in the company doing genuine stuff; then there’s online shopping, frivolous surfing of personal interest sites, endless accessing of news and current affairs sites in the name of updating one’s knowledge, visits to porn sites, online banking and investing—the list just goes on and on and on. Yes, Net surfing is the niftiest way to aimlessly while away time since chewing the cud and shooting the breeze. The difference is that the latter two were rarely done at work.

The problem has got to a stage that it now merits its own name—Cyberslacking. There’s even a site dedicated to cyberslackers—it’s called ishouldbeworking.com and proclaims to be the best place for slackers, goof-offs, procrastinators, loafers, ‘long-lunchers’ and Web-addicted employees worldwide. And we’re not talking small potatoes here; studies show that companies are losing billions of dollars to recreational surfing and e-mail/IM chit-chatting by employees at work. Gartner estimates that non-work-related surfing costs US companies $54 billion in productivity loss every year. And as more and more companies around the world are now routinely providing a majority of employees with Net access, other countries will soon catch up with or surpass these loss figures.

So what’s the solution? No one’s suggesting that we need to throw the orange out along with the peel. Instead there’s a critical need for every company to develop an ‘acceptable use policy’ for the Internet. Not only would this save the organisation time and money, but it also might save considerable embarrassment and perhaps even litigation somewhere down the road. Going with the New Age credo of “Trust, but verify,” in addition to an Internet Access Policy (IAP) it might also be necessary to put in place monitoring and filtering software. In fact, there’s a whole new industry emerging out there, which goes by the name of Employee Internet Management, and which, according to IDC, is expected to grow to $600 million in the US by 2004.

But ultimately, technology alone is not going to make cyberslacking go away. Employees need to be made clearly aware of the fact that personal use of the Internet at work is a privilege rather than a right. It’s a management issue, really. A recent survey found that over 80 percent of US corporations have some form of IAP in place. And very soon we’ll have an IAP of our own too here at Express Computer. That’ll happen when I get down to formulating it; but first, I’ve gotta go check my e-mail ...

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com