At a holiday party last night, conducted at a fellow public-interest organization, I learned to my shock that my colleagues at this organization have been blocked by their management-information-systems (MIS) manager from using AOL Instant Messenger.

Look, I understand the traditional MIS arguments against chat clients — security, bandwidth, copyright infringement, etc. — but the reality is that, for many office environments at least, instant messenging is a serious productivity tool. It facilitates coworker conversations about the work at hand, allows rapid exchange of documents in development (this is particularly useful for law offices), and even lets you know whether coworkers are at their desks or not, in case you do want to go to their offices for a face-to-face meeting.

And if you’re working for a company that has different offices around the country, instant messenging can promote a sense of immediate connection that gives the whole enterprise a greater sense of unity. I know one colleague who’s about to open a West Coast office for his Washington-based organization — I have told him that, in my own experience, having instant messaging makes it a lot easier to coordinate work within a bicoastal organization. (Easier even than e-mail, because IMing allows instantaneous two-way conversations.)

Okay, maybe if you work for the State Department, your MIS guys have security concerns that trump all this. But if you’re working for an NGO, or for a publication, or for a law office, you ought to be exploring whether instant messaging helps your productivity. Leaving it to the conservative instincts of the MIS guys is the wrong approach. The very same pro-security arguments offered against allowing chat clients can be offered against allowing Web sites, e-mail, or even computer use — opposing instant messaging seems to me to reflect the same sort of timidity.

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