Instant Messaging Monitoring Helps Ensure Both Compliance and Productivity
May 05, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
In both our personal and our professional lives, we’re mad for instant messaging (IM) today, with the numbers climbing ever higher each year. According to a 2013 report from Radicati Group, the number of worldwide IM accounts are expected to grow from over 3.4 billion in 2013 to over 4.4 billion by year-end 2017, which represents a growth rate of seven percent. Mobile IM represents a considerable portion of the growth, according to the research company, thanks to new features, and more users are accessing their organization’s IM service while on the go.
“Mobile IM services are showing strong growth with features that allow mobile-centric users to experience IM functionality that was once only attainable on a desktop client,” wrote the report’s authors. “Users are becoming more dependent on mobile devices for communication.”
The report also found that the boundaries of IM is becoming blurred as more people become heavy users of social networking services and mobile-only IM providers.
“Major social networks like Facebook (News - Alert) and Google+ offer IM services that are heavily integrated with the network’s interface; at the same time, the increase in mobile-only IM providers signals the importance of providing anywhere access to Public IM networks,” wrote Radicati Group.
In a business setting, keeping track of all these IMs becomes a distinct challenge. Many companies engage in call accounting in order to protect themselves from liability, keep costs under control and discourage employee time- and resource-wasting. Once upon a time, the heavy use of IM would have presented an insurmountable problem for many companies engaging in call accounting, particularly those that must archive all communications to comply with legislation such as the financial industry’s Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. Thanks to those rules, IMs – which are considered “correspondence” in the same way e-mails are -- IMs must be stored for a period of no less than three years for companies that fall under the regulations.
Companies are seeking solutions such as those offered by ISI Telemanagement Solutions (News - Alert), Inc and its partner Verba Technologies that allow them to automatically archive and store instant messages in a way to render them searchable and retrievable.
“Archived IM conversations are displayed using the same interface as voice and video recordings,” wrote the company on its Web site. “All of these interactions are archived together and IM sessions are searchable as rich text/HTML. This offers a timeline view of complex conversations where the session starts with IM and is escalated into a call. It is the only way to provide a comprehensive trail of interactions for compliance purposes.”
Another bonus to the technology is the ability to ensure that employees are not wasting time with inappropriate IM use. The solution helps companies ensure IM users stay on task and are compliant in their activities through real-time interaction monitoring. As with any communications technology, IM has great potential for productivity, but also great potential for abuse. Monitoring can help ensure that it’s being used as a business tool and not a distraction.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi