Instant Messaging making an impact on the enterprise
New research by Ovum examines the corporate use of instant messaging and the issues that it raises. It is based on a survey of large European organisations that probed their disposition towards instant messaging.
Corporate instant messaging use to double in 2005
Instant messaging has arrived in the enterprise, confirm the analysts Organisations are planning to double their use of instant messaging in 2005, mostly by deploying private corporate networks.
There is confidence that instant messaging can bring substantial business benefits through speeding up decision making and improving communications.
Users were worried about its intrusiveness, its disruptive capability, and its security implications. However these concerns diminish as users gain experience with the medium and become confident that they can effectively manage the risks. Organisations believe that instant messaging will become established and they want to embrace it.
Findings indicate that leading enterprises are reaping substantial business benefits by integrating instant messaging with their workflow and communications
infrastructure. This integration is the key to business benefits.
Why is instant messaging an issue?
Instant messaging has the potential to enable a new order in electronic collaborative working. The industry stands at the crossroads and 2005 is the
year to establish corporate policy to instant messaging within a context of an overall communications and collaboration policy.
Instant messaging has advantages over both telephone conversations and e-mail in certain situations. However unmanaged and uncontrolled use of instant messaging creates several dangers for the organisation. A policy is needed to protect the organisation, its employees, and its position relative to regulatory compliance.
Today instant messaging is an immature technology. Organisations are looking to the vendor community to provide the tools they need to effectively manage
instant messaging environments. They are also looking for standards and interoperability technology to link different instant messaging networks.
What is instant messaging
Instant messaging can be considered to comprise three levels:
* Another form of electronic communication
* A related "presence" application that publishes the current status of other participants in the instant messaging network
* A rich collaborative framework in which people can interact more rapidly and be better informed.
* Types of instant messaging network
* There are two fundamental types of network: public and private.
* Public networks are offered as services by providers such as MSN, AOL and Yahoo. Anyone can register on these networks and they are primarily
intended for use by individuals for social purposes.
* Organisations can install a private instant messaging network, based on products from major IT vendors or specialist vendors. Internal networks
are better aligned to business needs than are the public instant messaging services because the organisation can control how they are used, and because
of their security posture.
* The business view of instant messaging
The survey showed that:
* instant messaging helps to make decisions faster
* instant messaging fosters better communication
* instant messaging is widely used to improve communications with home tele-workers
* instant messaging has had little effect on the amount of e-mail traffic
* however instant messaging has reduced voicemail use
* the potential for using instant messaging to manage crises has not yet been recognised.
www.ovum.com
www.eema.org
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