“When employees leave, they take vital knowledge with them. Without a process in place to capture that knowledge and transfer it to their successors, it winds up lost forever. As a result, those who follow them in the job take a longer time to get up to speed, important discoveries and insights disappear, and the company’s ability to act quickly and intelligently is crippled,” says Anne Field, Harvard Business School.
It is a massive problem and one that is bigger today than it has ever been, in part because of the ease with which employees can remove company information with USB drives and BYOD. But equally, the problem is exacerbated by how so much important information resides in an unstructured form in email rather than drives and filing systems.
Employees don’t even think it is wrong to effectively steal a company’s information, much less take it to a competitor, as this shocking Symantec report proves:
"Half of employees who left or lost their jobs in the past 12 months kept confidential corporate data, and 40 percent plan to use it in their new jobs," says the report.
The problem may be old, but there is a new solution…. Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) do a good job of capturing that key knowledge that links all this information together. ESNs store information in a way that is searchable, project-or-case-based, linear, chronological and contextual - and in a way that is hard to steal and endures long after an employee has left the company.
This is the mission of the ESN, among other things: To capture not only the information and the conversation around it, but to make the context of it patently obvious at a quick glance. Therefore ESNs solves the Harvard problem that Anne Field identifies by highlighting discoveries and insights, and greatly enhancing the company’s ability to act quickly and intelligently.
This article is a simpler version taken from:
Anthony Zets
http://socialmediatoday.com/antzets/2149566/data-security-risks-employees-how-social-business-solves-problem