Because of its geographically dispersed staff and high percentage of telecommuting employees, Intellicare, which operates health-related call centers, has benefitted from implementing an instant-messaging platform.

Through a network of medical contact centers and telecommuting nurses, the company offers medical phone support for about 250 clients, such as hospitals, health insurance companies and doctor's group practices. For example, a group of doctors would hire Intellicare to handle patient calls after business hours.

IM has helped Intellicare create a sense of virtual community among its employees, facilitated the provisioning of remote training and boosted real-time communications within the company, improving the flow and availability of information needed to provide services.

"Most of our work is done over the phone. We have implemented our business using a remote-workforce model so we can leverage [geographically dispersed] clinical resources that would not normally be available to a traditional bricks-and-mortar organization," says Jeff Forbes, Intellicare's CIO. "Keeping that remote-workforce model in mind is the reason why we selected an IM platform when we did."

Intellicare, which was founded in 1997 and is privately held, has an operations and data center at its Portland, Maine, headquarters. The company also has call centers and other facilities in Connecticut, Maryland, Texas and Missouri. But about 75% of its nurses work from home. Because of the dispersed nature of its staff, the company decided it needed to invest in a messaging and collaboration platform that could support its virtual workforce. About two years ago it made the decision to replace Microsoft's Exchange messaging and collaboration platform with competitor Lotus Notes, and soon after, it implemented Lotus' Sametime enterprise IM system.

"One of the drivers to migrating to Notes was that we were looking for a far broader architecture to support the business," Forbes says. "We weren't just interested in e-mail, but in a broader platform that would facilitate education and communication, and a sense of corporate community throughout Intellicare."

Before this change, Intellicare employees weren't allowed to use IM. "We didn't permit it because we didn't have a secure platform, and our IM platform carries in it data that is sensitive," Forbes says. "We like Sametime because it's an encrypted environment, it's well integrated with Notes' security model and it provides an auditable process: You can log IM conversations so if there's any issue, we can go back and re-create what happened."

Putting employees on a public IM network and securing their communications with a management and monitoring tool wasn't an option for Intellicare. "If you use the term 'public network' with our customers, they'd have a huge problem with it," he says.