Instant Messaging is the electronic equivalent of an informal conversation in the hallway, or across the cubicle wall; if you have multiple sites, and many small businesses do, IM can give your employees a quick and powerful way to communicate between sites. In addition, IM can be useful during meetings and con calls, when you need to communicate something important, but can't hold a sideband conversation.
The first and best practice for IM is to roll out your own IM system, rather than relying on consumer tools such as AIM. By deploying your own IM system, you stay in control of your company's security - an in-house IM will protect you from viruses and adware. Another benefit of having your own IM system is that the flow of information stays within bounds you have defined, rather than having every conversation flow out to some public server and back. Your data is secure. Finally, most in-house IM systems have ways of tracking conversations, so you're able to make sure employees' conversations conform to company policies for courtesy and security. Make sure your employees know that you're saving all of their conversations.
Finally, establish rules for acceptable IM behavior in your organization. The same rules of conduct that apply in your company hallway conversations should apply in IM as well: all conversations should maintain a casual, but professional tone, and no thread should ever be offensive.
If you apply these few simple ideas for IM in your small business, your employees will enjoy a more productive workplace, with more cohesive teams.
—Phillip Karren, GroupWise Product Manager,
Novell.
Instant messaging is an integral part of the business communications mix, which also includes the phone and email, however, IM increases the efficiency of communications due to its real-time nature. Unlike the phone and email, IM allows for immediate interaction that speeds the time of problem or issue resolution and allows employees to complete more tasks in a shorter amount of time. However, before choosing the right IM system the following should be taken into consideration:
• Is your company in a regulated industry such as healthcare or financial services?
• Is the content of the information being sent back and forth via IM fall under any privacy policies or other regulatory requirements?
• Will the IM system be used just for business, for example in management and employee and/or employee to customer communications? Or will it be open to usage on the Public Internet for personal chit-chat with friends and family?
All of the above should be considered before choosing the right IM system for your company.
There are basically three different approaches to the use of IM in business:
1) Secure IM is used internally to communicate between employees and management. This is the most secure, least complex and most regulatory-compliant IM strategy. WiredRed’s e/pop is a good example of this class of product. This approach is further divided into on-premise software; and secure online services.
2) A hybrid approach is often used when employees need to communicate with customers or consumers. This allows the use of consumer IM systems from vendors such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo, but the IM content and traffic is stored and logged with a third-party product from companies that include IM Logic, Akonix, among others. It should be noted that this strategy may meet financial services regulatory requirements (logging, auditing and tracking), but not HIPAA or privacy-related requirements that may require private information to be encrypted in addition to being tracked and logged.
3) Consumer IM services allow employees to utilize AOL, MSN and Yahoo IM for personal and business use. This is a problematic strategy because not only are there no security assurances, leaving your company open to potential hackers and eavesdroppers and regulatory and privacy liabilities, but employee productivity may drop dramatically because of time wasted chatting with friends and family. In addition, there is a very good chance that the company’s entire network may be compromised by viruses, Trojan Horse or other typical desktop PC infection.
Once you have purchased and deployed the appropriate IM system, it is imperative that you provide training and education to all employees to make sure they understand that IM is for business issues that require immediate responses to queries that require a quick resolution. If the issue requires a response in 60 seconds or less then IM is the best way to communicate on that particular issue. Generally any customer-related problems, stock-outs, weather closures and other emergencies are the types of events that require a quick resolution and all are ideal for IM.
Products like WiredRed’s e/pop are often used in support of internal, employee/management communications as mentioned above. In this regard, we can authoritatively comment on the best practices within the secure IM environment:
• Block all consumer IM services at the firewall. This can easily be done with all leading firewalls and other products such as those from WebSense and others.
• Among secure IM products for business, select one that provides security via encrypted traffic, audit and reporting, directory integration, multi-server support, and most importantly, client lock-down so end users cannot change settings
• Directory integration allows end users to own the same identity across the network, including those in the email and IM systems. Utilizing a system that supports directory integration makes management of the IM system easier for your IT personnel or department
• Audit and reporting capabilities are required for regulated industries. Install and/or enable audit and reporting to make sure the relevant audit trails and reports support any company or regulatory retention requirements
—Tom Toperczer, Vice President of Marketing,
WiredRed Software.
