By JENNIFER COMES ROY
KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WICHITA, Kan.- Now that electronic mail has usurped written memos as the primary means of communication in many offices, its misuse should come as no surprise. Workers can use e-mail to gossip, to complain, to pester - in short, to do all sorts of things that have little to do with actual work.
What comes as a surprise to many of those workers, however, is that their messages are not as private as they think.
"You're sending something out on a broadcast wire," said Rick Watkins, senior director of employee services at Pizza Hut's corporate headquarters in Wichita. "It's very much like a telephone, and there are people on there who can monitor it. It's a tool, and it can be abused, just like long-distance telephone calls."
Though computer systems managers at many local large companies say they have neither the desire nor the resources to police every message, on occasion, they have to monitor some of them. The tough part, they say, is determining where to draw the line.
"Our people have the right to preserve their privacy, but the company has the right to inspect, record copies or remove information if there is a basis for looking at that mail," said Michael Leck, an area manager for Southwestern Bell Telephone.
But, he said, it would be heavy-handed for the company to reprimand every employee who sends the boss a "Happy Birthday" message or sets up lunch with a colleague. There is no one who screens the company' s e-mail on a regular basis, Leck said.
"We would expect that people would be using e-mail primarily for business purposes, but personal communications that are incidental to the business use are not prohibited," he said.
When e-mail started to become commonplace, companies found themselves dealing with a number of new issues, ranging from the privacy of employees to the acceptable use of company business machines to the need to protect sensitive company information.
Generally, the only people given auditing access to a company's e-mail are systems managers. What most often forces them to audit an employee's e-mail, they say, is the possibility of criminal activity or industrial espionage.
"Very often within the e-mail, there's proprietary data, pricing data, competitive, sensitive data," said Bob Carman, telecommunications specialist at Boeing Computer Services in Wichita. "So if a court case came down on an e-mail message that one employee sent to another, all messages could subpoenaed."
"Boeing's position is that the company owns the computer hardware, the computer network and the data produced on it," Carman said, "so personal use is discouraged. Virtually all large companies have that policy," he said.
Other systems managers say they, too, ask employees not to use e-mail for personal reasons. But they acknowledged that some personal use continues anyway.
The problems with messages multiply when the company has access to outside on-line services, such as the Internet. Exchanging e-mail on bulletin boards, for example, has systems managers worried because the messages are more difficult to monitor.
At Boeing, "We do use the Internet and send e-mail messages between companies," Carman said, but anyone who sends e-mail or receives it through the Internet uses a Boeing address.
"We would have a concern if an employee was to post a note on a bulletin board on the Internet that was political or religious in nature," he said. ''When the employee posts the note, it will be marked Boeing, even though it's a personal message. The Boeing Co. doesn't want to have its label on a bulletin board that doesn't necessarily represent its positions."