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Business professionals who have to juggle e-mail, cell phones, landlines, pagers, faxes and now instant messaging are in danger of becoming "multitasking junkies," says Tom Austin, a vice president at Gartner, a technology consultancy based in Stamford, Conn. He believes IM social chatting is less of a threat to productivity than is the splintering of focus that the technology encourages. While bouncing from one conversation to another, Austin says, distracted workers are more likely to miss key points and make mistakes. He likens the risk to eating and talking on a cell phone while driving. "It can create...
Most analysts studying IM in the workplace predict that it will rapidly evolve into a mature medium like phone and e-mail, posing no special threat to worker attention. Today's concerns about instant messaging, experts say, are not unlike those that were voiced about e-mail when it was introduced in offices...
...meantime, these concerns represent an opportunity for companies that are developing IM systems geared to business users. In contrast to the consumer-oriented instant-messaging systems operated by AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, IM systems for the workplace are being designed to cut down on the technology's intrusiveness and link it to phone, fax, e-mail and videoconferencing...
Most users of one consumer IM system can't send messages to users of another--say, from AOL to Yahoo, or Microsoft to AOL. Third-party software, available from vendors such as Cerulean Studios and Imici, can make the connection. But some customized systems for the workplace can do the same trick while providing greater security...
...make no mistake: security is the most important reason that demand is growing for customized IM and group-chat tools. Unlike corporate e-mail systems, which typically use networks and servers controlled by the client company, instant messages on the consumer-oriented IM systems move across public networks and through servers controlled by AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo--an arrangement in which sensitive business information is considered more vulnerable to eavesdropping by hackers. Says John Tang, an engineer at Sun Microsystems: "Companies don't feel comfortable sending messages out through their firewalls to a server that somebody else has control over...