The Business Case For IM In The
Enterprise
Is Still Not There
According to an July 2007 article in Network World, a major study was conducted
around instant messaging, presence and real-time communications.
The most common reason for not deploying enterprise instant messaging as pilot or
in production is because the business case for
Enterprise
instant messaging is not strong enough. The reason was given more frequently than
cost, security or outbound content management.
Presence is becoming more important to the lion-share of organizations;but, it is
not all that important today. Only 19% of the survey organizations put a high priority
on integrating presence into their applications. Twelve months from July 2007, it
is estimated that roughly 33% of organizations will put high priority on presence.
NOTE: Presence provides you information whether a individual you may desire to reach
is in fact "present" and prepared to respond.
According to the study, 75% of businesses said that the reason for slow to no adoption
of presence is that there are more critical priorities ahead of implementing presence.
Interestingly, instant messaging and presence are where email was in 1995. In 1995,
you could still find business people who doubted the usefulness of email as a communication
enhancement. Shockingly, they could not come up with a compelling business reason
to use email. You can’t find someone today who does understand the value of email.
Low cost and fast message delivery are
immediate responses.
The article states that what will resolve the bottleneck in the instant messaging,
presence and real-time communications area is development of sufficiently compelling
applications. The applications will need to motivate the organization’s leaders
to promote their role. Jabber was noted as an example of an application that is
making interesting applications happen.
Finally, the article goes on to say that
if IM, presence will take their rightful
place, decision makers will need to be proactive in their understanding of what
these technologies can do. The article ends with: “innovative use of IM and presence
can speed organizational decision-making, provide better customer service, etc.,
in ways that can provide real competitive advantage simply because many of your competitors are probably not yet using these capabilities.”
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