Practical Data Analysis: Case Studies in Business Statistics
Sample Case
Case 53: Everybody Does It
Case 53: Everybody Does It
The president's tone of voice did not seem to allow for much disagreement, so Fred let the issue drop, but on the way back to his office, he had a "why me?" feeling about the whole affair. Somehow, what started as a simple case of an employee's using a company computer for personal business had gone out of control, and now the president was irritated enough to decree that the Information Services (IS) division would examine every file in every company computer to see if it represented appropriate use of company resources. As the vice president to whom the IS division reported, it fell to Fred to implement this idea. His only hope at the moment was that perhaps the president was just having a bad day and would relent if an alternative approach could be developed.
BACKGROUND
Fred's company, MegaMicro, had 40,000 employees in 10 sites in the United States. They manufactured a variety of software, micro-code, and hardware products sold to many different kinds of customers and industries.
MegaMicro's 10 sites used approximately 100 mainframe computers, linked by various networks, as near as Fred could remember offhand, and no doubt thousands of personal computers, many of them linked to servers, mainframes, and each other. "That must add up to millions of files," he mused, "and there would be no way of automating the examination of them. We simply have to talk him out of the idea."
THE INCIDENT
About a month ago, a supervisor at a Louisiana MegaMicro site had passed the desk of an employee who reported to her. While the employee was not at his desk, the supervisor did notice a printer actively churning out paper, which to all appearances could be nothing but the up-to-date standings of the local bowling association, and apparently about 50 copies. The individual involved had been warned about similar activities before, and the supervisor felt she had no choice but to invoke disciplinary action, which (in view of the employee's past record) had led to a notice of dismissal.
The employee in turn appealed the dismissal to higher levels of the company, using the novel defense of "everybody does it." While at first no one took this defense particularly seriously, the employee persevered, and when the company attorneys were consulted, they advised that if, in fact, everybody did do it, the employee might have a case. To be sure, there were stated policies against use of company resources (and computers in particular) for nonbusiness purposes, but there were similar policies against using company telephones, too, and, as the employee pointed out, no one was ever fired for calling home to ask if the family needed milk, to say he or she would be 10 minutes late, or to check to see if the kids were OK, even though such acts did violate stated company policies. The unwritten rule permitted them.
In short, if everybody did it, it might actually be "OK." Thus the higher levels of the firm decided they needed to know the extent to which people actually did use company computers for nonbusiness purposes.
Fred presumed that the president hadn't really thought about the details when he suggested that the IS division should examine every file. Perhaps he could be persuaded to settle for an examination of a sample of files, but Fred wasn't sure. Even if only a sample was used, the problem loomed large: how could IS determine if a file was or was not appropriate for company business? Some, of course, would clearly be inappropriate, but many would be hard or impossible to label "OK" or "BAD." He had no ready alternative, though: it was unlikely that employees would respond to a survey saying, in effect, "yes, I cheat." For present purposes, Fred had no interest in knowing who might cheat. (Indeed, he had no interest at all in the matter, but apparently it wasn't going to go away on its own.) He just needed a defensible estimate of, say, what fraction of the employees did so, or what percentage of the system resources were so used, or something similar.
Devise a practical procedure, survey, or other process that Fred and/or the IS division could use to obtain a reasonable estimate of the extent to which MegaMicro's employees do use company computers for personal purposes.
