The danger of Doodle

Most of us are familiar with the pain and grief of trying to find suitable dates and times for meetings.  The process usually starts with an email like this:
—————
To: Sue, Alec, Mandy, Karen, Pete
From: James
Subject: Project planning meeting

Hi Guys
We need to get together. Which of these dates & times suit you?
Tue 6 at 3
Web 7 at 10 or 4
Thu 8 at 9.30 or 11
Fri 9 at 3
Regards
James
————–

Sue, Alec and the others reply by email and their replies land in James’ inbox, fighting for attention amongst all the other messages, newsletters and junk. James has to keep track of the replies, tabulate the data to find the optimal date and time, and then email the date to the others.

Anyone who has gone through this rigmarole knows how time consuming and frustrating it is.  Yet the web offers many simple and free tools to take the pain out of this chore: for example Doodle www.doodle.com; AgreeaDate www.agreeadate.com; Meet-o-Matic www.meetomatic.com

The alternative and easier route for James would be to go to Doodle.com, enter dates and times into a table and send his invitees a link to the table. They simply enter their name and mark the dates and times that are suitable. James checks Doodle at his convenience and can see at a glance the best time for meeting.  Doodle does all the tedious tabulation and calculation, saving everyone time and hassle: a great example of making the web work for you.

OK, so Outlook can do a lot of this. But what happens when you want to invite people outside your organisation who don’t share your Outlook calendar? Or when the meeting organiser is outside your organisation?

In spite of the potential to improve productivity, the data manager in one Scottish local authority explained the reason for blocking access to Doodle:

Doodle is categorised as ‘personal network storage’. We block all items in this category to prevent potentially damaging data leakage and DP [data protection] breaches as a matter of policy. The doodle site potentially exposes our internal mailserver to unknown third parties with whom we have no formal data sharing agreements. If you wish to share diaries then I’d suggest speaking to IT Support to see what can be arranged internally.

Now, we don’t live in a risk free world and I can’t help wondering if Doodle and the like do in fact pose a real and serious risk of data leakage or breaching data protection law. Would technical resources and expertise not be better deployed encouraging and supporting staff to exploit the potential of simple, cheap and effective web-based tools rather than developing internal solutions? The Christie Commission seems to suggest that this option at least ought to be considered:

…the public sector, at all levels, can do more to transform how it procures, manages and uses digital technology to drive better public service delivery. We need to ensure that services are tailored to meet the needs of individuals and communities – exploiting the full potential of ICT will be critical in achieving this transformation.