March Madness is well underway, which is great news for fans of college hoops but can be a perennial nightmare for IT staff, with the threat of misused company resources, hogged network connections, and hours spent watching video and scores when there’s work to be done.
Datamation has a report on what’s really at stake in terms of lost productivity, and ways a company can look at minimizing the damage — or even figuring out a way to embrace March Madness so that it doesn’t suck up everyone else’s bandwidth.
Play-by-play announcers are already busy this month making the big calls in the annual “March Madness” NCAA basketball tournament. And that means lots of fun for basketball junkies and bracket-betting fans.
But does IT have a prayer of reining in these non-essential uses of network bandwidth? Just as in other big events like the Monday after Superbowl Sunday, or breaking news like Tiger Woods’ apology, March Madness sees many employees rushing to the Web to catch the latest scores, chat on social networks and check out video highlights — productivity be damned.