Regulators turn on IM
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In its traditional list of New Years resolutions, influential IT industry analyst group Gartner said that piloting a corporate instant messaging (IM) system should be one of the IT directors 10 'must dos of 2003.
In its traditional list of New Year's resolutions, influential IT industry analyst group Gartner said that piloting a corporate instant messaging (IM) system should be one of the IT director's 10 'must dos' of 2003.
Many companies followed the advice. About a third of all workers who use email now also use IM products, with many using some of the newly-hatched enterprise-grade products rather than the freeware provided by Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, according to Osterman Research.
While IM use in the enterprise often came in under the IT director's radar, the same cannot be said of stock market regulators, many of whom have learned to sharpen their claws since the disgraces of the dot-com era.
First to act was the New York Stock Exchange, which said that its members must now ensure that they save all instant messages for several years. Now, the National Association of Securities Dealers has made a similar ruling.
Some companies already have IM-governance policies in place.
US investment bank Merrill Lynch, for example, says it plans to keep a record of all instant messages sent by its employees for at least three years.
But while the financial sector is moving fast, most industries neither monitor instant message use (assuming they know their employees are active users) nor store instant messages. The messages may pop up in real time, but widespread IM governance will take a lot longer to appear.
