Advocates Case Study
With the help of PixAlert, inappropriate images are virtually eliminated in the workplace thereby ensuring computer usage compliance and increased productivity.
Providing community-centered services that empower people to deal effectively with their difficulties to pursue their own individual aspirations.
Advocates is one of the largest service providers in Massachusetts offering quality human services and health care alternatives. Individuals and families affected by psychiatric illness, chemical dependency and developmental disabilities rely on Advocates for professional assessment and intervention. Advocates provides a continuum of mental health and substance abuse services throughout the Boston MetroWest area.
Advocates manages over 100 group residences, respite services and supported housing, serving close to 800 consumers. Their outpatient mental health and substance abuse clinics and Psychiatric Emergency Service provides more than 25,000 visits annually to individuals and families.
Optimizing IT technology yet managing “Visual Viruses” in the workplace
- Expose management, directors and stakeholders to legal and/or court proceeding relating to a hostile work environment and/or sexual harassment.
- Reduce employee time spent on work related activities, thus reducing productivity
- Dilute availability of valuable storage space due to back-up of non-work related images
Managing Human Resources
Effective human resource management involves policies and procedures as well as an ability to audit activity against the standards set. These procedures are in place to ensure that policies are being adhered to thereby protecting the company from theft, fraud or malicious intent. An example is expense management where actual receipts are matched to a reimbursement request to ensure compliance.
PixAlert - Protection from Illicit Image Abuse
“PixAlert is easy to use, well designed and simple to implement. It seamlessly provides us with the ability to ensure that our business computers and network are not being used to view inappropriate or unlawful pornographic material.” Christopher P. Buckley, Director of Information Services, Advocates
Advocates recognizes that while they have a written computer usage policy signed by all employees, they are not managing actual computer usage to the policy. The exposure was tremendous including legal and litigation costs, reduced productivity, and storage constraints along with negative impact on their reputation. Solution Advocates engaged Trinity Consulting, Inc., an expert in IT infrastructure security, to help them identify the gaps in their IT infrastructure affecting their business process and procedures. One problem identified was the potential of “visual viruses” entering the Advocates’ internal network. Trinity Consulting recommended PixAlert Enterprise to monitor images viewed on each client machine on the Advocates’ network. PixAlert Enterprise is comprised of two effective image detection applications – PixAlert Monitor and PixAlert Auditor.
PixAlert Monitor sits on client PCs throughout the Advocates’ organization, watching screen content for inappropriate image content. If a displayed image, above a set sensitivity level is viewed on the client PC, a thumbnail representation along with the machine name, username, date/time and program used are recorded on the client PC. This content information is sent to an administrator machine located remotely. An authorized person reviews the logs and if a specific machine registers numerous suspect images, he/she can view information such as the image and details associated with the image and determine a course of action. Once a suspect PC is identified, the next course of action is to deploy PixAlert Auditor on the suspect PC.
Run remotely or directly on the suspect machine, Auditor does a full scan of all files on the PC to examine all images and ranks the content on the basis of inappropriateness. Audited images are presented to the authorized person in a ranked manner. He/she can then add any inappropriate images found into a fully documented case file.
Summary
Advocates found PixAlert Enterprise an easy to install solution that provides an effective means to prevent potential huge financial liability by identifying inappropriate and/or illegal images on their company IT network. The PixAlert Enterprise solution made it easy for both management and employees to focus on the job at hand and reduce the instances of spending time on inappropriate behavior.
