Use of Yammer by VA staff was a major security risk, investigation says

a) no one actively admining the service, in particular removing accounts when people left.

b) users themselves were communicating things they were not supposed to, like instructions for circumventing other security procedures.

You can just as easily have these problems with an internal service.

Telling is that the illegal advice VA staff were giving each other had to do with circumventing other security procedures that were interfering with their ability to work effectively (like needing to be available via email but not having access to email on an available device). These are issues all big organizations face, regardless of whether they are purchasing IT services or implementing themselves.

Sounds more like it wasn't made clear what was or wasn't an okay internal communication tool, which points to a lack of training and IT management.

That's a pretty scummy business model, IMO.

Basically, it seems Microsoft designed Yammer so that any employee of any organisation can start/join a Yammer network for their employer just by using their work e-mail address. If the employer then wants to actually administer the internal social network that they've unexpectedly wound up with - for example, to remove ex-employees - Microsoft charge them a substantial monthly per-user fee.

Employee engagement is a key metric for a productive workforce but the studies that I saw all showed it declining over the past decade. Along come the 'social platform' salesmen and cleverly pitch at Business clients, who then tell Technology that they've found a solution to engagement if we'd just hurry-up and deploy $PLATFORM.

The enthusiasm usually lasts until the end of the initial support period, three years say, and then another $PLATFORM arrives which will definitely solve the problem.

Providing a social platform is fine but the employees need to have meaningful, empowered work before they'll even be motivated to look at it. In the absence of that, coercion reached the stage where employees were being forced to create their profiles on the new platform as part of annual goals.

So many profiles created and avatars loaded, never to be used...

The article talks about the guy that posted the fix to reading old email by copying an encryption key. It's discussed in a light as if he were doing something wrong but in reality he was probably solving an actual problem people have. In the process, it sounds like he also exposed the fact that you can copy keys our of what sounds like should have been a read only smart card but that points to the VA IT department being inept not that guy doing anything wrong. The fact that employees use yammer to begin with probably is because the IT department is inept and doesn't provide a good sanctioned forum for communication.

How else would you expect it to work? Email doesn't cut it (point to point, not searchable, low signal:noise) and I haven't seen a high functioning wiki, which seems like the closest alternative.

For sales in particular, though, I think the integration with SFDC (in Chatter's case) is pretty key. They live on Salesforce, so the messages & communication is right there and can easily be linked back to specific accounts as necessary.

Working in a large, dated codebase, I would love to be able to see previous discussions about features, pieces of code, code reviews, etc. But because they occurred over email, they undiscoverable to me.

Chatter was free, standalone, came actually close to what Slack does. But it wasn't hip enough to start in the early adopter circles, they went straight into enterprise with it, which is how you kill anything innovative. fist you get the hipsters, THEN you go after the suits. other way round kills your product due to wrong feedback.