Why is it Important to Moderate Your Workspace?
While chat apps enable fast, easy, creative cooperation between employees and clients, chat messaging apps make it more difficult for archiving essential communications.
A 2019 Gartner study found that 80% of executives agree that their companies will lose competitive advantage if they don’t effectively manage and utilize their data. And more than half of organizations do not have a formal data governance framework or dedicated budget for data governance.
Most enterprises store all communication in digital archives. But if the archives ever need to be accessed due to legal or regulatory issues, it can be a nightmare to find pertinent chat communication in the archives. By creating an effective system of chat governance, enterprises can easily comply with regulations and protect their business and employees.
Sifting through Records and Disposable Information
The FTC requires enterprises to record and store data pertinent to the enterprise for a set period of time. So, depending on the types of chat communication, an enterprise needs a system for determining whether the chat communication data fits this requirement for storage.
One of the main functions of chat governance requires sifting through chat communications. This is to determine what needs to be recorded and what communication data can be disposed of immediately. And because regulations can vary from state to state, enterprises may need to store more information depending on where they conduct business.
What’s Considered a Record?
According to the University of Richmond, a record is information that an enterprise should store because it has long-term value to the business. Or information that must be accessible for a few different reasons. Such as legal, accounting, regulatory, or auditing purposes.
What’s Considered Disposable Information?
Disposable information is any communication that isn’t deemed valuable for legal, regulatory, accounting, or auditing purposes.
Categorizing Chat Data
Effective chat governance should separate data into categories of:
- Data that needs to be kept as a record
- Data that is disposable right now
- As well as data that can be disposed of after a set retention period
53% of enterprises rely on third parties for data governance and storage. There are several advantages of utilizing a chat governance system, whether using a third party or an in-house system.
In-App Chat‘s direct messaging enterprise solution includes a customizable chat management console for managing users and data. Completely compliant to regulations, the eRTC API is a secure, cost-effective solution for chat governance. What’s more, by leveraging this system, your enterprise can enjoy all the benefits of effective chat data management.
Benefits of Chat Governance
The Wall Street Journal states that companies need to develop a platform that can ingest and store data in a compliant manner because of increased data complexity and volume. By categorizing data in real-time through chat governance, your enterprise will:
- Create operational and strategic value through effective and efficient data use.
- Create completely searchable archives for discovery requests.
- Enable cost-effective and efficient responses to inquiries.
- As well as, allow new app functionality to be compliant to regulations.
Have you been looking for a third-party enterprise solution for instant messaging? Learn more about our eRTC SDK. eRTC SDK is a scalable, manageable, flexible, feature-rich application that gives you full data control.
Related: Flexible Chat API Deployment Plans
Biggest Challenges for Chat Governance
A Bi-Survey study found that the biggest challenges for effective governance are:
Lack of Resources
Many companies lack the personnel and resources for implementing data governance. For this reason, most chat communication ends up in a cumbersome data warehouse. If resources are a problem, consider utilizing a turn-key solution from a data governance third party.
Data Cleansing
Data cleansing scrubs data to identify and remove inaccuracies and inconsistencies within the chat communication for better quality, analysis, and query. This can be increasingly difficult with chat communication because of the fluid, informal style of communication. Data cleansing is a huge problem that often requires additional software for your chat application.
Data Quality Management
There are standards that data processing needs to follow for better data assessment. But because chat communication has a lot of human interaction, there is an increased probability of data errors, formatting errors, and other miscommunications, which can be very problematic for data quality.
Data Integration
Another chat communication challenge is data integration. The data may be of the incorrect format, have poor quality, be a duplicate, or be unclear and wrongly categorized. If this happens, then the data becomes less effective for increasing strategic value.
Best Practices for Implementing Chat Governance
To effectively manage chat communication, enterprises should integrate a governance platform that:
- Put procedures in place to classify communication into proper archives.
- Automate as much as possible for collecting, storing, and deleting chat data.
- Establish regular schedules for retaining or destroying chat data.
- Enable security and privacy controls for sensitive data communication.
Effective Chat Governance Will Enable Competitive Advantage
Enterprises that invest in a chat governance platform will significantly increase their competitive advantage by integrating and leveraging communication within the workplace. By creating an efficient, categorized digital archive, companies can create a cost-effective solution for data inquiries and collaboration.
In-App Chat offers a turn-key solution for direct messaging for your enterprise or integrated chat for your applications that is entirely compliant and easy to govern with our proprietary management and monitoring systems. Encrypted with threat protection, you can customize a direct-messaging solution that fits your users’ needs.
Do you need a turn-key, customizable, feature-rich Chat API that’s easy to govern? In-App Chat offers Cloud-based and On-Premise Chat API solutions to increase your competitive advantage.
