Instant messaging: managing the inevitable

Once primarily a toy for teenagers, instant messaging – in both computer-based and mobile phone-based forms – is increasingly popular in the office. Few businesses can afford to ignore it, not just because of the potential benefits but also because of the pitfalls. In 2006, a study by the American Management Association found that 35 per cent of employees used instant messaging at work – about half of them without management permission or information technology staff involvement. “We’re probably looking between one third and one half of organizations now have enterprise instant messaging,” estimates Bryan Rusche, unified communications product manager at Microsoft Canada Co. in Mississauga, Ont. And how many employees use consumer IM services like those from MSN, America Online and Yahoo at work? It’s hard to say, but the number is higher than managers think, says David Sengupta, Ottawa-based director of business development for the unified communications business unit at Quest Software Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif. His company offers services to track and manage instant messaging use within a company. When Quest offers free trials to prospective customers, he says, it asks first how much instant messaging their IT managers think is going on. Frequently they estimate there are a few pockets adding up to perhaps 1,000 messages a week – but “it’s not unusual for us to find 40,000 messages instead of the 1,000 that we were expecting,” Sengupta says. Should managers be concerned about that? Yes. IM is faster and more convenient for some purposes, but all the same concerns apply. Companies need to have policies on what kind of information is sent via instant messaging, how long messages are kept, and all the other concerns that are already familiar from the e-mail world. But often they don’t. While about 70% of companies have formal e-mail policies today, only around half as many have policies on instant messaging. The answer is not to ban IM – because that won’t work and because IM is a useful tool. “There are so many use cases,” says Akiba Saeedi, program director for unified communications and collaboration at IBM Corp. “It is an alternative communication mode, and in a lot of cases it’s a more convenient one.” Bob Hersch, global lead for Accenture’s infrastructure consulting practice, argues that businesses must adopt IM because it’s so much a part of younger people’s lives that they would find it hard to accept a workplace without it. “They have to bring IM into the workplace, simply because the next generation that’s coming into the work force is using it so predominantly,” he says. As a result, it’s difficult to ban IM once your employees have already downloaded the free tools from the internet. People like IM. If you take it away you’ll likely have an unhappy workforce, and perhaps unhappy customers as well. “It becomes so ingrained in the way you do things,” says Saeedi, “that if it’s pulled away from you, you don’t know how to operate any more.” Celina Insurance Group, a 170-employee insurer based in rural Ohio, was an improbable corporate IM pioneer when it introduced instant messaging in 2000. The company had not even had e-mail until then, says Robert Shoenfelt, who became Celina’s CIO that year. As long as he was installing e-mail, Shoenfelt decided to add instant messaging at the same time, using IBM’s Lotus Sametime package. With the average employee age at Celina over 50, Shoenfelt wondered if IM would catch on, but he says it has become an indispensable part of the way the company does business, with everyone from the president to the receptionist using it. Celina even provides IM to its independent agents, who can use it to get quick responses from company underwriters. That means an extra level of customer service that gives the company an edge over larger competitors, says Shoenfelt. IM: more that super-fast e-mail IM can be looked upon as instant e-mail, but with at least one important twist: presence. An IM client shows you whether the person you want to contact is online and available or not, so you know whether he or she will see the message you send right away. That’s something neither e-mail nor the phone provides. It makes IM a good tool for getting quick responses to simple questions. “I tend to use IM for tons of instant-gratification type things,” says Brian Bourne, president of CMS Consulting Inc., a Toronto consulting firm and Microsoft partner. If you need a quick answer for a customer, for instance, IM lets you see which of the people who would know are available, send an instant message to one of them, and get your answer right away. The telephone offers similar immediacy, of course, but not the ability to check a person’s availability before calling. And in some situations, IM is more discreet than the phone. An instant message can be used to ask – or answer – a question without interrupting a meeting. Hersch uses IM as a back channel during meetings. Colleagues can quietly pass each other information, corrections and reminders as they talk. “It’s kind of like using a teleprompter,” Hersch says. And while IM isn’t always the best way to deal with something, sometimes it’s a way of determining a person’s availability before communicating by another method. “For the last seven or eight years,” says Saeedi, “I don’t ever get on the phone before I’ve IMed the person first to determine whether now is a good time to have this conversation.” Shoenfelt says IM has replaced a lot of internal e-mail traffic and virtually eliminated voice mail within Celina. It helps employees who work from home keep in touch – which is important because, given Celina’s remote location, allowing remote work helps the company get the talent it needs. Shoenfelt says he often exchanges instant messages with colleagues while working at home in the evenings, because he can see whether they are online, whereas calling a co-worker after hours would be intrusive. Doesn’t this promise of instant gratification make IM a source of constant interruptions that prevent people getting other work done? It could. “I think there are some people who literally operate from an IM window,” Hersch observes. A lot depends on how it’s used. While IM is great for quick questions, Bourne says he prefers e-mail for things that need a more considered response or aren’t urgent. Hersch’s Microsoft Office Communications Server client is integrated with his Outlook calendar so he’s shown as unavailable when his calendar says he is busy – but he also marks himself busy when he wants to concentrate on a task. “The end user needs to manage it,” he says. Celina has invested in training employees on the appropriate ways of using IM. The company discourages employees from bringing laptops into some meetings so they won’t be distracted by IM, Shoenfelt says, and some issues are still better suited to e-mail. “I don’t want to get a complete system request in an instant message.” “I think there’s almost a natural regulation that happens,” Rusche says. “If I get an IM and don’t have time to respond, I don’t.” In Microsoft’s unified communications system, an instant message that isn’t responded to becomes an e-mail. “People start to learn over time that I don’t get responses for my instant messages for these types of questions.” There are other questionable ways to use IM, and its presence feature in particular. Shoenfelt remembers that when Celina first introduced instant messaging, some executives were using it as a virtual time clock. He remembers comments like “Brian didn’t get online until 8:32 this morning.” Especially with telecommuting workers, some supervisors were checking presence information to see if people were at work. That practice has largely disappeared at Celina, he adds. Used appropriately, its adherents say, IM can have significant business benefits. For instance Saeedi says instant messaging helps IBM close its books each quarter three days faster than the company did before IM – just because questions can be answered and decisions made so much more quickly. Managing the inevitable If IM is inevitable, then how to manage it? One of the first questions is what sort of IM platform to adopt. There are different opinions. Rusche, whose company offers a corporate IM platform made up of its Office Communications Server and Windows Messenger client, but is also in the consumer IM business with MSN, says an enterprise IM system is the way to go for businesses. “The applications that are consumer-based don’t lend themselves very well to be used as an IT-managed application,” he contends. Quest Software, on the other hand, offers tools for organizations to manage IM, whether it’s enterprise IM tools or consumer services. Quest recently acquired Akonix Systems, Inc., which offers software “to manage every aspect of that communication,” says Andrew Sullivan, product manager for the Akonix unified policy management line. Even for services designed for consumers, he says, it can enforce policies such as who can communicate with whom, filter content and log IM communications. Hersch says it may make sense for smaller businesses to let employees use consumer IM services rather than invest in an enterprise system, but for larger ones there are significant advantages to bringing IM in-house. Those advantages have a lot to do with tying IM into the bigger picture. “I think IM is one part of a broader (unified communications) strategy,” Hersch says. And he notes that very little of the consulting work Accenture does with IM treats it in isolation. “It’s usually part of a broader collaboration initiative.” “A lot of things that might start with an instant message,” Saeedi says. “And then you realize … this is more effective as a live conversation.” The beauty of unified communication is that it’s easy to switch among modes. An e-mail might be answered with an instant message, to which the response is another IM, which in turn leads to a phone call. An IM might even be escalated to an online conference with screen-sharing to resolve a problem, Hersch observes. “Ultimately that saves a lot of money, it improves our way of working.” And IM’s great advantage – presence – becomes even more valuable when linked to other modes of communication such as the phone and e-mail. Ultimately, some see IM being tied directly into corporate workflows and applications. As an employee works through a procedure in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, for instance, an action might need approval from a superior. Integrated IM could determine which of the people authorized to approve that action were available, and at the click of a button send an instant message to one of them so the process could proceed right away. Or an application might generate instant messages to alert employees to specific issues or actions that need to be taken. “I don’t think it’s going to be far off that we’re going to see work flow integrated with instant messaging,” says Hersch. The more integral IM becomes to corporate operations, the more important issues like security and compliance will be – but they’re important enough as it is. Instant messaging is another channel for malware and attacks on computer systems. “There are pretty creative people out there figuring out how to attack an enterprise through instant messaging,” Hersch says. And as happened with e-mail in its earlier days, the attacks are growing more sophisticated, Sullivan says. “There is a major security breach for organizations that have employees using public IM clients,” Saeedi maintains. And employees need to understand – which not all do – that instant messages can be just as permanent as e-mail, with copies stored on servers for an indeterminate time and capable of being retrieved and causing problems later. “There are certain things you shouldn’t say on e-mail,” says Hersch, “and the same rules apply to instant messaging.” This is why companies like Quest offer software that can filter instant messages, blocking certain dangerous phrases, for instance. Anyone using instant messaging for business needs to consider the same issues as they would for e-mail. What kind of information should be communicated this way? How long should messages be stored? How can information be retrieved if it becomes relevant to, say, a lawsuit? Celina has a simple answer to that: no instant messages are stored. That’s one option; storing them all for a fixed length of time is another. The important thing is that there is a clear policy and the company sticks to it. Any organization not already looking at these issues needs to do so, because IM has definitely progressed beyond teenage chatter. “Twenty years ago,” Saeedi recalls, “we were educating people about why they needed e-mail.” She thinks IM is at that stage now, and will ultimately become as ubiquitous as e-mail is today.

Instant messaging: managing the inevitable

News | 09/15/2008 2:00 am EDT

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