A Swarm of Little Notes

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David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says there is little hard evidence that IM makes offices more efficient. "My strong suspicion is that there are no further productivity gains to immediate communication that haven't already been realized by e-mail," he says. At the same time, he adds, IM provides an even greater temptation than e-mail does to "set aside real work" and engage in office gossip or chitchat with friends. Instant messaging, he says, offers "a vast potential for time waste."

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 an accident," he says. "You're not fully engaged."

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.

In the 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.

And 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." Besides, says Jennifer Belissent, senior product manager for Sun ONE Instant Messaging, a software package that includes IM, "there is the risk of exposing your networks to viruses and spam."

The market for integrated messaging software like IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's Exchange, which include a bundle of collaboration tools from IM to group folders and calendar sharing, is $2.6 billion a year, according to research firm the Radicati Group, based in Palo Alto, Calif. That market is expected to grow to $4.4 billion by 2005. Software vendors are also selling pieces of these collaboration packages as stand-alone products, which IDC's Robert Mahowald says will further expand the market for corporate IM and related applications. "If I am a small company," Mahowald explains, "I can buy only the tools I need instead of the whole box."

Many of the latest IM systems provide "presence detection," which allows users to tell whether their colleagues are on a conference call, have their cell phone switched on, are traveling and working on their palmtop, or have an opening on their schedule at a certain time. Sun ONE's IM software has a polling feature that can help sales reps get quick feedback from a team of managers on whether to offer a discount to a client.

Glen Vondrick, CEO of FaceTime, a fast-growing provider of IM software applications, says, "There is no other real-time, text-based communication tool where multiple conversations can occur simultaneously." That's one of IM's big advantages over e-mail, but a bigger advantage, Vondrick says, is IM's presence information. Far from encouraging workers to goof off, he believes, IM makes it more difficult, because everyone in a working group knows who is and is not logged on, and everyone is expected to be responsive to work needs. With e-mail, the sender usually doesn't know whether the recipient is online. (Some, of course, consider that an advantage of e-mail.)