Instant messaging’s back in business, says Symantec

27 Jan 2012

Survey suggests that corporate uptake of IM has been hampered by misperceptions about the medium. If these are addressed, IM could quickly supplant email as the corporate communications medium of choice, say researchers. 

Is the future of email hanging by a thread? Plenty of industry pundits would seem to think so, judging from a rising tide of conference presentations, newspaper articles and blog posts predicting email’s imminent demise. You only need to Google the phrase “death of email” to see the proof.

The truth is probably less dramatic. In some situations, email is being supplanted by social media tools such as Facebook or Twitter - but these are not necessarily appropriate for business conversations, especially those that need to be archived for future reference or as evidence in a commercial or legal dispute.

Recent research conducted by YouGov on behalf of IT security company Symantec suggests that Instant Messaging (IM) may provide some answers to some of the drawbacks that corporate users experience with email.

For a start, email is an asynchronous form of communication; in other words, a sender may wait a long time for a response to their message. At the very least, they’ll wait until the recipient checks their own email. That’s no good if the message requires a speedy response; for example, “Are you still on for lunch?”, or “Can you join a conference call in 10 minutes?”.

IM, by contrast, is synchronous – it allows for a quick-fire, real-time exchange of questions, answers and brief snippets of information. In the Symantec survey of over 2,100 people, for example, almost two-thirds (64 percent) of those who use IM do so to ask colleagues questions needing immediate answers, 46 percent use it to distribute information quickly and just shy of half (47 percent) say that IM allows them to multi-task.

But Symantec claims that UK firms are missing out on these benefits, hampered by misconceptions about the security of IM and the belief that it is too informal a medium for business purposes. Almost one-quarter (23 percent) of office workers who don’t use IM at work say that their companies restrict the use of IM in the workplace due to security concerns. Sixteen percent, meanwhile, claim that it’s not allowed because bosses believe it to be unproductive. 

These blanket bans don’t make good business sense, according to Tom Powledge, vice president of product delivery at Symantec. “With the right measures in place, companies can easily log conversations, scan for malware and block inappropriate or sensitive content from crossing the boundary of an organisation,” he says. IM, he claims, can enable companies to “improve productivity, support mobile and remote workers and gain operational efficiencies”. Naturally, Symantec has an answer: its newly launched, cloud-based IM monitoring service, IMS.cloud.

Either way, the future use of IM instead of email in corporate settings is an interesting proposition. At ‘world of work’ consultancy firm Tomorrow Today, Dr Graeme Codrington argues that it’s a tool that younger people (and some older ones, too) already take for granted. IM, he points out, is integrated into other programs, “from Facebook to many web-based customer support interfaces and we’re just getting more and more used to using it in a variety of different contexts,” he says.

In addition, he says, “our continued and rapid shift to powerful mobile devices and smartphones as our primary communications tools, not just for verbal but also for written communications (primarily in the form of text messages and emails) has fuelled the desire for more instant communication.” Codrington says he would not be surprised “to see the demise of email by the end of this decade”. Many, it seems, would agree with him.

But there are still clear advantages to asynchronous interaction via email; above all, the time to reflect, reconsider and to clarify communications. That brief pause before we press ‘send’ increasingly feels like a luxury in an always-on, real-time world – but its loss would be keenly felt.

Copyright 2012 - Imago Techmedia Online