Why enterprise IM?

Facebook, that Web 2.0 phenomenon and favourite web site of the socially inept and the self obsessed, recently announced that it will launch a new instant messaging service for its users. The free service, imaginatively christened Facebook Chat, will allow users to IM each other from within the browser – no downloads required – but they won’t be able to message non-Facebook IM users, and there's no group chat function. It has been touted as a rival to more established public IM clients like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Microsoft Live, which are widely used in the enterprise, often under the radar of IT.

Now the role of IM in the enterprise has been a long-debated topic ever since the messaging system burst onto the scene in the form we know it today, somewhere back in the mid to late 90s. Information workers rightly see it as a productivity-enhancing tool for sharing and collaboration, but on the other side there are the IT enforcers and business managers who see public IM use as a potential security risk, a massive drain on productivity and a compliance risk.

The first two arguments can be pretty convincingly disputed. Security threats to public IM protocols have been relatively non-existent due to their being generally non-interoperable – the malware industry is economics-driven and if the potential group of infectees is relatively small, it's just not worth the hackers’ while. In terms of productivity too, while IM could be abused and used for idle chit chat when your staff really should be getting down to some work, its usefulness comes in those situations that call for a form of communication somewhere between a phone call and an email. Quick questions and clarifications are a perfect example; check the presence status of a name in your address book and fire off a query – no hanging around waiting for an email to come back or the socially-required procrastination of a phone conversation.

But compliance with laws and industry regulations is more difficult to ignore. Put simply, if firms don’t regulate and manage IM usage they could be in for some very large fines, or even worse. The head-in-the-sand approach adopted by many organisations, who seem nonetheless happy to profit from the productivity benefits of their staff using public IM, is not sustainable any longer. Firms need to accept their users are doing it and invest in enterprise-grade systems which will secure, monitor and more importantly, archive messages for any e-discovery purposes. And there's no shortage of options. Led by Lotus Sametime in the late 90s, and followed by Microsoft, Reuters Messaging, and other players like the French-based Process One, they offer enhanced functionality including interoperability with public IM clients, and multi-chat sessions for online meetings.

The alternative is, of course, to block it completely, but with some of the most important information shared within organisations via IM these days, this would fly in the face of good knowledge management. And it will become increasingly difficult to justify, as a new generation of workers who have grown up with the messaging system enters the workplace.

Source:http://blog.iwr.co.uk/2008/03/why-enterprise.html

Posted by Phil Muncaster