Holtz Communications + Technology

Transparency is the business watchword of the decade; there are no secrets, the saying goes, only information you don’t yet have. When undesirable information leaks, businesses fail and CEOs stand trial.

The need for transparency is as great internally—if not greater—as it is externally, although little attention is paid to employees’ desire and need to understand decisions and the processes employed to make them in their…

CBS MarketWatch’s Frank Barnako makes an intriguing observation in his blog post exploring some

new research (PDF file) from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

The share of online Americans who say the Internet has “greatly improved their ability to do their job” has grown to 35%. Just about the same percentage says the Net’s “greatly improved” their abilities to buy stuff and pursue hobbies and interests.…

From the unlikeliest of places, a challenge has been mounted to the knee-jerk management belief that workplace Internet surfing represents a dire productivity problem. While companies like Websense have reaped the rewards of their fearmongering, a New York administrative law judge saw it differently today when he recommended the lightest punishment possible in the case of a city worker who…

I dream of a world without prejudice. Wars will be a distant memory. No child will go to bed hungry. And organizations will trust their employees enough to let them subscribe to RSS feeds.

In case you hadn’t heard about it, some companies have begun blocking RSS feeds at the firewall. The rationale for this short-sighted, counterproductive bit of paranoid stupidity ranges from…

Communication representatives from a third company have weighed in with details about the benefits of deploying social media for internal communications purposes. This time its Jim Lukach, manager of Online Communications, and Jochen Specht, webmaster, for Siemens Corporation:

Here are some of the things we are up to:

Here at Siemens we have found the new forms of online communications to be…

The second installment in this series comes from Michael Pusateri, vice president, Engineering at the Disney ABC Cable Networks Group in Burbank, California:

Is social media The Next Big Thing in our business?

Well, not to be a naysayer, but I don’t see it that simply adding blogs with a touch of wikis suddenly leads to big improvements in company performance.  IMHO, the…