Practical Data Analysis: Case Studies in Business Statistics
Solutions to Sample Case
Case 53: Everybody Does It
There's probably no good approach here, and we favor the "punt" approach: forget it, and focus on developing policies and procedures to reduce this kind of behavior in the future. Cut your losses and rehire the employee: all the approaches we know of cost more than they're worth, and when all is done, you'll still have to rehire the employee and reeducate everybody anyway. If you feel you must gather the information, there are some approaches:
Hiring an outside consultant to administer a survey probably provides the best guarantees of truthfulness, but even then, not all employees will be trusting.
The mainframes could presumably be programmed to provide a sample of files to be reviewed for appropriateness, perhaps by the individuals' managers. The individuals and managers will presumably be unenthusiastic about this. How this could realistically be extended to all the personal computers is problematic.
To be sure that inappropriate files aren't erased or disguised before the information is gathered, the inquiry should be more or less confidential. This raises concerns about privacy rights, and so forth. Alternatively you could announce the impending inquiry (and carry it out) not with a view towards getting good information, but hoping that employees will erase the offending files and stop engaging in this behavior.
In the actual situation on which this case is based, the IS division was directed to examine all file names and report anything that looked suspicious (BOWLING, BIORHYTHM, FLIGHTSIM, etc.) to IS management, which in turn was to speak to the manager of the individual employee involved. The IS division had no desire to be the bad guy in the eyes of the users (they already were for other reasons), but their protests were swept aside on policy grounds. A comedy of sorts ensued. One manager was duly notified that one of her employees had suspicious files labeled BIO1, BIO2, and the like. Investigation revealed that the names stood for "Basic Input/Output": the employee was a systems programmer, and the manager felt her time had been thoroughly wasted. The IS department employees gleefully renamed their own weekly status reports and other legitimate files with such names as GAMBLING, BIORHYTHMS, SOFTBALL, and so on, so that their own management would have to investigate them only to find them innocent (at least innocent of those offenses). Finally, enough managers put pressure on Fred and the president, and the whole thing was dropped. Whether the original employee was rehired was not reported.
