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Dateline Rochester – “A new survey says more than half of workers don't always follow or are unaware of their company’s security policies.”

Sounds kind of like my post last week about the propensity of people to copy sensitive documents out of SharePoint, doesn't it? But I promise I didn't go looking for it!

This most recent data point is the result of a new survey commissioned by Xerox and McAfee, and it says that 33% of employees don't always follow policy, and another 21% don't even know those policies exist. So while my friend Bud Porter-Roth is correct to point out (as he did in his comment on my last post) that companies often provide tools that work so poorly that they force people to work around them, it apparently also is true that organizations do a lousy job of educating their workers about the policies that are in place – and no doubt of enforcing those policies when breaches occur.

This right here is the soft underbelly of content management, for this has nothing at all to do with the technology and everything to do with human behavior. The more consulting work I do, the greater the number of classes I teach, and the deeper the research I perform, the more convinced I am of the absolute criticality of issues related to corporate culture and change management.

You can install the best system in the world, but it won't provide anywhere near the maximum value it could unless you take the time to develop policies governing its use, train your people about what's expected of them, and let them know what the ramifications of noncompliance will be.

I've written it before and I'll say it again: change management is a lot like parenting, and you have to work at it every day to produce the results you want and expect. So teach your children, and teach them well, lest you be counted in next year's survey statistic.