IM use 'should be monitored'

Instant messaging is still used more often for personal reasons in the workplace than for business purposes, a new survey shows.

A report issued on Thursday by Meta Group found that 57 per cent of the people surveyed at 300 companies worldwide use IM at work for personal chitchat more often than for job-related communications.

However, many companies have also adopted a more stringent attitude toward managing IM use than they have applied to email and phone calls.

Only three per cent and five per cent of the companies prohibit personal use of the phone and email, respectively, according to Meta Group. But nearly 16 per cent of the companies have banned the use of IM completely.

A predominant number of companies have also taken a hard line on personal IM use, compared with email. Sixty-eight per cent allow limited use of email for non-work activity, but only 44 per cent make similar concessions for IM.

However, the study also found that 35 per cent of companies have no official policy regarding instant messaging.

Ted Tzirimis, an analyst at Meta, said most companies still view IM as a consumer-driven application. Nonetheless, Tzirimis said the instant access to co-workers offered by IM is also proving itself as a valuable tool.

In a nod to IM as a productivity tool, Meta found that 56 per cent of employees use the applications at home for work-related activity.

"Organisations are still just beginning to realise the benefits of allowing IM in the workplace, such as being able to find someone immediately," Tzirimis said. "We believe that by 2008, most new employees will be assigned an IM account when they start a job, just as they are issued an email account today."

As a result of IM's growing popularity, Tzirimis said an increasing number of companies are looking at ways to track employee use of the applications.

A recent survey released by ePolicy-AMA found that 60 per cent of US companies now use software to monitor incoming and outgoing external email and that 27 per cent of employers use software to track internal email between employees. By contrast, employers have been relatively slow to monitor instant messaging, with just 10 per cent of companies surveyed indicating that they have taken steps to track desktop chat.

Tzirimis recommends that more companies use tools for tracking IM use, because the software potentially represents an even larger security threat than email, based on the sort of attacks designed to take advantage of the applications. Whereas an individual must typically click on an email attachment to trigger a virus, IM threats can be transmitted and redistributed automatically in only seconds and without the same level of end-user participation.

"Perhaps even more concerning is the high percentage of people using IM for file transfers, which represents a huge vulnerability," Tzirimis said. "We don't recommend that companies try to ban IM use, but they do need to take precautions to better protect themselves from IM-based threats."

Matt Hines writes for CNET News.com.