IM has come of age in the past few years. No longer just the province of chatty teens, it is now part and parcel to many corporations’ advanced communications networks. And as IM takes hold across the enterprise, companies are finding new productivity gains and improvements in customer response time as benefits.
Now, the generation of office workers that grew up with IM has gained control. IM has become the new black, the latest trend to take over IT. And in the process, IM is remaking how the corporate world converses and serving as the basis for a new series of communication applications.
I look at the reasons for IM’s popularity and its future in the enterprise, along with some examples of what people are using it for besides text chats.
You can read the entire New York Times article if you are registered here. I’ll be writing a lot more about IM in the coming months, including another piece for the Times about mobile Skype products.
David,
I always enjoy your columns, and your piece on instant messaging was no exception. However, there were a few points where my experience doesn’t quite match the picture you paint. I’d like to share my thoughts with you,
One is on the area of private IM networks. My company has one, but in our case it’s not because we’re building cutting edge applications on top of it. Instead, our admins cite “security concerns” with public IM, as well as a desire to eliminate the use of company equipment for private/personal communications, as the reason for hosting a private IM network entirely detached from the rest of the world. Challenge them on it and you’ll get a response like, “God forbid a sexual predator should use a corporate IM account to try to seduce a minor,” which, when you think about it, makes about as much sense as saying, “We can’t afford to build highways between our cities because a drug dealer might use them to drive from one place to another.” But sensible or not, that’s the reality…
The other big issue with IM is where it fits into the corporate records picture. Like lots of corporations, we’re playing catch-up to deal with records-keeping requirements in the wakes of Sarbanes-Oxley and other post-Enron legislation. Email alone poses a huge problem—I’ve seen estimates that as much as 70% of the business intelligence of the average company exists entirely in emails, never making it to any other format. So we’re all working to bring email into the corporate records management picture, subjecting to a documented file management plan (keep for X years, destroy after Y years, etc.) But IM may be an even bigger problem—if only because users feel that it’s a transient, disposable communication, like a phone call. That’s not strictly true any more though—Microsoft Communications Server, the enterprise replacement for Microsoft Messenger, includes the ability to log all IM conversations passing through it. The unanswered question is what happens when you turn on that feature? If I chat for a moment with my manager about a vendor contract, does the conversation automatically become subject to the requirements of our corporate records management policy for contract-related documents? How does the corporation track and mine that data? How do we make sure that we can find that conversation if three years from now we receive a discovery order for all documents related to the contract in question?
Before I came here, I was working at a programming shop that ran its entire business on IM. They’re not alone—there are countless businesses that do so, and for them the picture looks very much like the one you described in your column. But for many larger organizations, struggling with ever-increasing requirements for audit-ability, accountability and records management, there are tremendous roadblocks to achieving those kinds of benefits.
(name withheld)