Emlyn over at Trigram asks a great question about Web Office:

I still don’t think that “just trust your staff” is a strong enough justification, though - from my own evangelism of these technologies, I think there are bigger concerns - the concern about law suits, the possibility of IP leakage, and so on. Furthermore, speaking from an Asian perspective (there’s an alarming level of opportunistic job-hopping), what if you /don’t/ completely trust your staff? Are there any other, more quantitative, arguments that can be used to persuade nervous managers?

This is an important question. There are three separate trust issues related to Web Office: Behavior, Trade Secrets and Public Reputation of the company.

• Behavior can cover everything from people using Web Office to waste time and resources to using it to create a hostile work environment. Senior managers should always be concerned about these issues. However, these are people issues. They are not technology issues. People can make these mistakes regardless of the technology they use. An employee can leave a foul voice message that is then forwarded to hundreds of people just as easily as they can write an offensive email. To a certain extent, email is far more dangerous than any Web Office based tool, because once it’s sent, you cannot stop it. It is always possible to delete a web site. Thus behaviour issues should not prevent nervous managers from taking advantage of Web Office technologies.
• Trade Secrets The answer here is pretty simple. If you do not want something to leak out, do not post it on your internal intranet. Technology could be used to compare out-going emails with content marked as secret, but that is not an ideal solution. Access control can be used to limit who can read and who and write to certain blogs. If you have a small team working on a highly secret product, and they want to use a Project Page (ie a Project Blog), then limit read and write access to only members of the team. If this is managed poorly, it is completely possible that a disgruntled worker could walk off with important intellectual property.
• Public Reputation This isn’t as easy. Obviously, people can copy something, take it out of context and create an embarrassing situation for the company. Internal enterprise blogs are more risky that emails in some ways and much less risky in others. The increased risk comes from having more eyes having the opportunity to look at something that is posted on an internal blog. However the flip side is that management has more control should someone make a mistake. You can always take an offending web page down. Email is not like this. Once it is out there, it is gone.

Weighed against these risks, is the possibility that your competition will figure out how to successfully address them and still get all the benefits of increased innovation associated with the successful use of Web Office technology.

In the end the challenge for senior management is not whether they should trust their employees, but instead, how to create an environment where they can trust their employees.