Subscribe The book supplier Amazon for example found that the bestseller among one major bank's
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The book supplier Amazon, for example, found that the bestseller among one major bank's employees was Hannibal, the novel about a serial killer, a sequel to the film The Silence of the Lambs.The private use of a firm's link to the internet is also hitting the bottom line, with one industry estimate showing non-work use can cost a 1,000-employee company up to £20m a year. As much as 59 per cent of internet use at the office is estimated as not work-related. And, as a result of all this inappropriate use, increasing numbers of employees are being disciplined and sacked for unwarranted internet abuse.One of the major problems created by the internet is that although most people know how to work it, many don't really know how it works. And because they don't know, they have difficulty figuring out ways of controlling it.
Managers may be skilled in auditing usage of paper, pens and yellow sticky memo pads, but the internet for many of them is a world of hi-tech mystery as unfathomable as the inside of Dr Who's Tardis.Steve Purdham, CEO of SurfControl, gives the example of how one company couldn't figure out why its network was so slow, delaying the processing of sales orders. The reason, it transpired, was that all the workers in the production area had taken to using the net to listen to the radio."We seem to have reached the stage where almost everyone knows someone who knows someone who has been fired for not using the internet properly," he says "Orange fired 35 last week. But it shouldn't reach that stage."One of the problems is that the internet is being put into operations without anyone really understanding the impact it is going to have. The internet is just something else within the company that needs to be managed and there has to be a tool to manage it.'' That is where SurfControl comes in. Its software products allow companies to monitor the websites its employees are visiting, and restrict access to what each company decides are inappropriate sites.But although the concept, like those behind most successful ventures, is simple, the details took more than two years to develop. To work, a protective system not only has to be alert to words, it has to have a contextually based filter too.
A worker who types in the word breast as a keyword, for example, might be looking for porn, but could also be hunting for a cancer site or a cookery site."It is very complex. Some addresses are very similar but very different in content Take moneyworld and moneyworld.co.uk. How do you know which is a hard core porn site and which is hard core financial advice. As an employee, if you go to the wrong site, you get fired.'' Moneyworld.co.uk is financial.The system developed by SurfControl, formerly JSB Software, not only works, it has turned the Congelton-based company into that rare British corporate animal, a market leader in its sector of the US-dominated internet industry.When Steve Purdham joined JSB it was a run-of-the-mill computer company. "Then it was a bog-standard company supplying up-and-coming micro-systems into companies with business packages. In the last three years the business has gone from a parochial UK operation to a global operation."It had grown to a workforce of 40 or 50, and stabilised because there was nothing driving it beyond that point That tends to happen to companies in the UK. They reach a certain level and they stabilise because you need something to break out of the mould.