SITTING INSIDE EVERY OFFICE is a hidden world of games, shopping, social networking, TV shows, commentaries, sports leagues and music. There are literally millions of people stacked one on top of the other, squished into little boxes or windows or tabs, each talking about one topic or another, from the latest political news to the latest celebrity gossip. There are literally thousands of stores and malls, always open for business when someone decides to stop on by. There are hundreds of addictive games to play, most of which nobody’s ever heard of – the days of having to

choose between hearts and solitaire long gone.

The Internet, often praised for saving time when it comes to finding and sharing information, can also be a grand waste of time.

While most employees are still getting their work accomplished, not all Internet usage is equivalent to the 15-minute coffee break of the past.

One survey conducted by AOL and Salary.com found that the average employee spends two hours of each work day browsing the Internet for non-work purposes.

A recent study that monitored employees working for the federal government’s Department of the Interior found that staff members had spent 104,221 hours in one year wasting time on the Internet – but that was counting only time spent at auction and gaming sites. Despite having software that blocks certain kinds of Internet Web sites from being accessible, 148 computers in the DOI’s Bureau of Reclamation showed Internet histories containing sexually explicit Web sites.

According to another Internet usage study, which surveyed 10,688 employees working in a variety of organizations, about 20 percent of the time people spend on the Internet while at work is devoted to personal use, and not business. The study found that shopping was the most popular time-waster, followed by entertainment, email, sports, chat rooms, job searches and game playing.

Harris County recently began using software to track their employee’s Internet browsing. The results? The county’s 15,000 employees had hit up “adult content” – that category includes sites other than just pornography – sites 148,000 times in just one week. Dating and personals Web sites had 3 million hits in just a month. “News and media” sites received 5 million hits in the same time period.

Using the software has “helped us to understand what is happening,” said Candace Marullo, the managing director of the county’s Enterprise Technology Solutions IT division. “Some of the categories aren’t even problematic, it is just amazing how often they are visited. We found shopping is such a huge thing that people do on the Internet. You know it’s not just on the people’s lunch hour, and it’s a huge loss of productivity.”

To cut back on that loss of productivity, Harris County has begun drafting a specific policy geared toward Internet use, and some, like Taylor and Fort Bend counties, have begun blocking access to certain types of sites.

“We do not allow anyone to have access to myspace.com. There is just no legitimate reason why someone has to have access to MySpace from work,” said Charles Cook, the Information Technology director in Fort Bend County, naming just one site that may pose a multitude of problems for companies – loss of productivity, streaming videos that take up bandwidth, etc. “Since we are a county, and we do have the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office, there are times when there has to be an investigation, and so we can open that site up to those users temporarily by request.”

The county’s policy includes a clause informing employees that “filtering services were added to the County to monitor and/or block any inappropriate site(s). The purpose of the filtering services is to protect eCounty resources, conserve bandwidth and help enforce online service policies.”

But loss of an individual’s productivity is not the biggest problem associated with Internet usage at work, said Texas Association of Counties Chief Information Officer Stan Reid and others.

In most cases, addressing that issue can be done without an Internet Usage Policy – if someone isn’t getting their own work done, supervisors can always step in and say so. Cook said it is more a county’s overall loss of productivity that becomes the problem – if everyone is abusing their Internet privileges and accessing non-work related sites, playing games, watching streaming videos and downloading contents that may contain spyware or adware, the network slows down for everybody else. That’s because each county only has a certain amount of “bandwidth” allotted to them – sort of the Internet equivalent of the number of phone lines.

Cook said he bases the restrictiveness or lack thereof of his county’s Internet policy partly on the county’s amount of bandwidth. Fort Bend recently upgraded its bandwidth capacity.

“We had a file from a particular vendor that we used for maintenance, and before this upgrade, to download this file for the county, it took one hour and 45 minutes. After the upgrade, it took two minutes. Exactly the same file,” he said. “That’s the issue. If I’ve got the bandwidth to do those things, to download the file, then who cares? But if it is going to take me an hour to do something because too many people are using the Internet wrong, then that’s a different issue.”

The county’s policy has clauses that ban several popular Internet practices that take up a lot of bandwidth, such as web sites or downloads that are “likely to cause network congestions or significantly hamper the ability of others to access and use the services … including but not limited to the following items: Weather Bug, Internet Radio Stations/Sites, MP3 Files, Music/movie downloads, etc.”

The county also has set preferences that restrict employees from emailing and downloading files that go beyond a certain file size. Harris County has also been experiencing some bandwidth issues and is looking into implementing an Internet usage policy as a result. “The actual Internet traffic is huge,” said Marullo, adding that traffic is not the only reason the county is developing a policy. “We really have a lot of challenges. … We have had people fired for inappropriate material found on their computers, we have had some viruses.”

The county already has a more generic electronic equipment use policy, but Marullo said the policy is “just not enough” to cover the problems that keep rising, some of which – particularly those related to harassment, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and copyright law – could lead to lawsuits.

“We know we need to give them rules for copyrighted, illegal materials, for downloading, for anything that would be proprietary. ... You have to tell them that they cannot operate their business from work,” Marullo said.

Having a way to protect the county from costly lawsuits is perhaps the biggest motivation for drafting a specific internet use policy, added Cook.

“That is the genesis of all of this, to protect the county and also to protect the employee,” he said. “An Internet usage policy is not a blocking policy.”

Lawsuits aren’t the only thing Internet policies protect the county from. Nowadays, many of the innocent-looking “fun” sites contain hidden software that can slow down a system or network without users knowing how or why. Prohibiting certain types of sites – such as those offering free games – can help keep a network running smoothly. Often, though, users don’t understand why such sites are prohibited, and if they are not actually blocked, many people may play anyway, during lunch hours or while taking a quick break. For that reason, Reid said counties should look at writing their policy so that it is as much an educational tool as it is an enforcement tool.

“The most important thing that any county can do, whether they’ve got a solid policy written or not, is education, so that users know what to do and what not to do and what bad things can happen, not in terms of getting fired, but in terms of affecting the network,” Reid said.

“We can do a lot of things from the technical side to prevent bad guys from getting into the system, but in the end, it’s the user that is your biggest challenge.

“What is more important is educating the users and changing the culture of the organization to look at the internet in a different way,” he added.

According to the Texas Department of Information Resources, one of the first issues that should be considered when drafting an internet usage policy is enforcement. Strict policies that state that employees cannot use the Internet for personal use may be difficult to enforce, and policies that require counties proactively monitor their employee’s Internet usage may find that the resources required to do that are not

cost-effective.

“Originally, the City of Abilene had a proxy server that everyone had to login to for Internet access. That proxy server kept a transaction log of all sites that anyone visited. Once a month or so I would get an Excel spreadsheet file of all of the access from the county’s IP addresses.

I would skim through it and have a talk with the department head of any employee that it looked to me needed it,” Kemp said. “A couple of years ago, the city decided to quit pro-actively monitoring their users. The county wanted to keep the monitoring capability, but use it re-actively instead of pro-actively. So we setup our own server that keeps a transaction log. We use a PC server running LINUX and a freeware monitoring application. Now, if a department head asks me to give him a summary of where a certain person has been on the Internet lately, I can do that.”

“The reason that we are doing it re-actively instead of pro-actively is that it was taking close to 10 percent of my time, four hours per week, and growing to skim the file,” he added, bringing the argument about whether to monitor computer usage back full circle.

“I just didn’t have the time for it anymore,” he said.

Stop Shopping: Or whatever it is that’s wasting taxpayer resources on the Internet / By Maria Sprow

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