Operations Management

Operations management is about managing the day-to-day activities related to using social media. A company has to have structured processes for these activities and clearly defined roles for operations. Operational weaknesses can lead to downtime of the social media tools being used, lost opportunities or increased risk resulting from incoherent or incomplete business processes, or the loss of data through weak restrictions on social media.

The role of IT in providing security for a dispersed medium such as social media has to be clearly defined and articulated both to the IT department and to the end user. In the “Human Resources” section, you defined the IT security policies that must be applied to social media. Operations are the implementation of those policies. How involved should security be and where is the line between IT and the business unit owners such as Marketing and Legal? The roles of defining the security issues may fall on the IT department, but working and educating employees and the business unit owners may fall to different groups.