Survey finds that the vast majority of companies still ban instant messaging within their organizations, even though they can see the benefits surrounding its use.

Just found another related article on IM published in July 08 – in Techworld – Survey finds that the vast majority of companies still ban instant messaging within their organizations, even though they can see the benefits surrounding its use.

It seems the concerns are equally around security as productivity.  Here are some key extracts from the article:

Research released by instant messaging firm ProcessOne shows that 72 percent of U.K. businesses have banned the use of public IM software, such as MSN, AIM, and Yahoo, because of security worries.  Yet a Vanson Bourne survey of 100 senior IT decision-makers from enterprises of 1,000 or more employees, also discovered that 74 percent of respondents think IM could provide valuable collaboration benefits to their organization.

IDC recently announced that IM was set to overtake e-mail as the preferred form of business communication by the second half of 2010.  

Yet despite IM being viewed as an effective tool for non-intrusive, real-time communication regardless of location or surrounding, it seems that at the moment, security concerns are at the foremost of organizations minds.  Concern centers on allowing the use of public IM applications within an organization; 88 percent of IT directors said they were worried by this. In fact, more than half (56 percent) said that their organization was worried about losing sensitive business information through IM conversations. 

The research also found that about half of IT directors thought that staff would be reluctant to use a corporate IM tool instead of using the public IM software that they were used to, leaving them with little choice but to ban IM completely if they were concerned about security.

For businesses that are considering an IM solution however, Mickaël Rémond, CEO of ProcessOn, said “The most difficult part is to address the workflow of the worker,” he said. “If you provide yet another tool for your workforce there can be trouble. The most important part, is the deployment of the application. Next, you have to define your policy, and you may need a tool to switch people from public IM to corporate IM.”

Extracts from original article by Tom Jowitt, Techworld
July 11, 2008

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/11/Companies_still_love_and_loath_IM_1.html

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