Rating: +0
Rajeev,
For many financial services corporations it is mandatory. Here is an excerpt of guidance that the National Association of Broker Dealers issued way back in 2003.
NASD Provides Members Guidance Regarding Instant Messaging
Washington, DC — NASD today advised member firms about the use of "instant messaging" by employees, saying firms must ensure the instant messaging is being retained for at least three years and the communication does not violate NASD rules governing sales literature and correspondence. The advisory was issued in a Notice to Members.
The full link to the guidance is below.
http://www.finra.org/PressRoom/NewsReleases/2003NewsReleases/P002902
IM’s have made their way into business “transactional” vehicles over the years, and today a broker can execute a trade based on an IM over AOL from a customer “buy 100 shares of MSFT, now”. There are even systems in place that interpret an IM and if it appears to be a transaction, like the message I just mentioned the system will automatically parse and take the text and place it directly into an order entry system, as field level data, and then save a copy of the IM (like a receipt) attached to the order. IM’s during the dot com era was gearing up towards integrated shopping carts and the vehicle for purchasing, but that never really happened, instead technologies that afforded live help on shopping sites moved into the forefront for usage, but IM’s just simply dominated as a tool of choice for instantaneous communications. It’s odd that today we still don’t have a singe protocol, and through all the usage there are many proprietary methods of communicating. Other industries are not regulated, as such, as financial services orgs are; but with court orders going after e-mail most corporations should anticipate that IM is just another electronic record that contains evidence. And the reason for keeping it; is purely for legal discovery. The stance is that it’s better to know, than not know, keep in mind that for every conversation with a party on the other side of your fire-wall the other organization may be keeping that correspondence, so in the event of litigation someone may know that little extra something that may sink you or save you.
The technologies have existed for a long time, to capture, store and search IM’s. Also, the transactional traffic dwarfs emails, typically an order of magnitude of 20x. The storage consequence though is not as high, since using attachments in IM’s has never really caught on; but for individual transactional counts it can be a problem for many OLTP systems to deal with, this is where good archiving systems do well since their approach to long-term storage is very different than OLTP type systems.
Good Luck,
Peter
August 2008
* http://www.finra.org/PressRoom/NewsReleases/2003NewsReleases/P002902