Getting the message across

Instant messaging in the workplace is nothing new, but now its use is being legitimised thanks to a series of partnerships between technology vendors and IM service providers. But while corporate messaging solutions might be the latest addition to the collaboration and knowledge-sharing arsenal, Claudine Beaumont asks if IM has what it takes to become a business-critical tool?

It’s official: instant messaging (IM) is, according to vendors at least, the latest must-have collaborative tool for the workplace. But, in reality, IM has been a mainstay of the office environment for far longer than most managers realise.

Over the past few years, increasing numbers of employees have been using IM software, like Yahoo! and MSN, at work. While a significant percentage of forward-thinking ‘power users’ have already latched on to IM’s potential as an online knowledge-sharing and project-management tool, most workers just use it to chat to friends and family.

This unregulated, piecemeal approach to IM has made it a significant threat to corporate network security. A recent survey by Hitachi Data Systems suggests that only 22 per cent of UK businesses monitor IM usage and fewer still actively archive it.

It’s partly for this reason that IM has gone corporate. Last month, portal specialists Plumtree unveiled a shiny new addition to their Enterprise Web offering – Yahoo! Business Messenger, an IM program based on Yahoo!’s popular public software, but specially tailored to meet the needs of corporate users. Plumtree and Yahoo!’s alliance comes several months after a similar partnership between HP and AOL.

Suddenly, it seems, companies are starting to see the business value of IM. They’re also recognising the benefits of rolling out a secure enterprise-wide solution to replace the public IM programs currently used by renegade employees. Industry analysts Gartner estimate that by the end of the year, there will be around 40 million IM business users and 61 per cent of all messages sent will be business-related.

Where IM software can really come into its own is as a real-time communications channel in the workflow process or customer-relationship-management chain. For example, a front-line employee dealing with a customer enquiry by phone may want to check a technical detail with the engineering team. By using IM, he can send an instant request to a specific engineer, who is then able to provide real-time information to be relayed to the customer.

Other organisations with an emphasis on intellectual capital could also find IM software revolutionises the way they work. IM user groups can be set up for remote, real-time online meetings, project discussions or knowledge-sharing exercises. Rather than trawling through content archives and information repositories, the user can go directly to the person who holds the appropriate knowledge to seek guidance, advice or a second opinion.

Tempting as it may be to save money by implementing a free IM program, IT staff and the management team should be aware that such solutions are inherently insecure and hard to manage. Messages sent via public IM programs are delivered in plain text across the internet and could be easily intercepted. These IM clients also permit unregulated file sharing and document exchange, which can be open to abuse from unscrupulous employees.

Business IM solutions are an exercise in risk mitigation; they fill the security holes left open in public IM programs and give administrative control of the system to the organisation itself. Most products offer virus protection and spam filters, data encryption and central control of major features like file transfer and data sharing. Crucially, many business solutions are compliant with corporate governance legislation, ensuring that all messages are centrally archived and fully retrievable.

IM is being widely touted as the ‘new e-mail’. In fact, one of the perceived benefits of IM is that users can respond to messages as they receive them, rather than once they’ve ploughed their way through hundreds of e-mails hours later.

Several studies suggest that the use of IM could boost workplace productivity and yield a significant return on investment, with Gartner estimating a 40 per cent reduction in e-mail use in IM-enabled enterprises. Research from Harvard University shows that IM can be a far more effective way of multi-tasking than conventional methods of communication, with the average user able to support up to nine concurrent chat sessions at any one time. Gartner also anticipates that the number of long-distance phone calls in IM-enabled businesses will decline by 30 per cent, passing on significant cost savings to the company.

While IM is, for the most part, shielded from many of the problems that have undermined the power of e-mail, common sense suggests that this will not last forever. Sooner or later, users will find that their clean, streamlined communication channel has been clogged by pointless chatter or a new breed of viruses, and then companies will be back to square one. There is also some debate as to whether the reactive nature of IM is really the best way to work. IM encourages users to ‘fire-fight’ problems or enquiries as they flash up on their screen rather than take a long-term view of time management and task prioritisation.

Yet for now, corporate IM tools are providing an innovative solution to the age-old problems of collaboration and workflow processing; a well chosen product can provide an invaluable back-office communications channel. Corporate solutions also address many of the frailties of free messaging software, placing administrative responsibility firmly in the hands of each organisation and shoring up the security flaws that have made public IM programs such a threat to network integrity.

Although IM is a well established medium, it is still in its infancy as an enterprise-specific knowledge-management solution and it remains to be seen whether it can make the permanent shift from niche collaboration tool to business-critical communications platform.