There's an interesting article at CIO.com today discussing the ongoing problems that employers are having with (mostly younger) workers accessing their social networking sites at work. CIO points out that, while it is technically possible to ban access to social networks from enteprise networks, this often only encourages people to access them over slower mobile phone connections instead, resulting in even more wasted time. Sensibly, several of the execs interviewed for the story view this as an issue of corporate culture and practices, not IT governance. Some of the good advice from the article:

The message from companies who manage consumer technologies effectively in the enterprise is simple: be fair, and in most cases your employees will pleasantly surprise you.

"Banning this kind of technology is the safest, most efficient and 'IT common sense' thing to do, but it's not realistic," says Thompson of BEA Systems. "The devices, and social computing sites are here and our employees will bring them into the enterprise. If you ban it, then you are really just sticking your head in the sand and losing an opportunity to manage it."

Sounds right to me.