Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

There has been a strong reluctance by businesses, especially IT departments, to allow the use of instant messaging (IM) by their employees.

Scott Werndorfer, cofounder and head developer at Cerulean Studios says, "IM is a good thing, but you need to get it under control, you need policies and standards."

"They think it's a distractive tool for chatting. While it can be that, so too can the phone and so too can e-mail,"

"It's more about employee integrity, saying 'Look, don't screw around on our time, people just need to understand that when you're at work and you're IM'ing that it's for work only."

One thing that will be really helpful for managers is that developers are understanding the need for tools to monitor the practice and are responding with new features like encryption of IM conversations and logging and archiving of each IM conversation, which will allow for a much better use in the business environment.

The bottom line in this is that we really can't manage it properly without the technology there to be able to monitor what is happening in the messages. I would insist upon the features mentioned above before I let IM tool lose in the workplace.

The only other tactic we can use is to remind our workers that abuse of IM is the same as calling friends at work and there will be consequences if its misused.