Are You Ready For Instant Messaging?
By Bob Boyles, Principal
Smarter Distribution

Ever heard of SPIM? You soon will.

Your teenage son uses it religiously. Your employees are using it right now to communicate with their friends and family from their offices. Instant messaging is growing rapidly because combines the easy of use of email with the speed of a phone call. What was once a toy is fast becoming an accepted method of business communication.

I spent the day recently in a sales meeting where everyone had brought their laptops and the conference room offered wireless access and watched from the back of the room as the audience members critiqued the presenter via instant messenger as he went through his routine. But instant messaging has some wonderfully productive benefits besides entertaining you during a boring sales demo.

Companies that are offering on-line catalogs are offering the ability to communicate with a salesperson via instant messenger to answer any questions that come up. This smoothes the on-line sales process and takes some of the wariness away that customers may have had in dealing with you on a complex product. Some distributors with active web-sites and on-line catalogs are offering this capability today.

Imagine the ability to magically tell if someone you wanted to talk to was sitting at their desk ready to take your phone call. This type of communication known as "presence" will eventually allow your desk bound salesmen to be much more productive and eliminate the game of telephone tag. This is not a Star Wars way in future technology. As Microsoft continues to integrate its various MS Office features it is building this capability into its software. For example, with their new Enterprise IM Server the user can see if the sender of an email is online and start and chat session from inside the email client (1).

As it grows instant messaging is going to offer benefits and challenges just as every new technology has. Email is great until you show up a work one Monday morning and you've got 300 pieces of spam cluttering your in box and half of those contain viruses! Instant messaging offers the same challenges. SPIM is instant message spam. Unwanted messages that popup from those same despicable cretins that try to pawn off Viagra doubled to 500 million messages in 2003 which is a far cry from the 100s of billions of pieces of spam that sail around the world.

Currently the instant messaging market is fragmented between AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, each offering a different standard that can't easily communicate with their competitor. Just as we've had shakeouts in the early browser market and other software applications look for the same type of standardization in the coming months in the instant messaging market. In particular look for a split between the free downloadable AOL type programs used by consumers and a pay-as-you-go business offering. Corporate IS managers tried from fighting battles with spam are likely to understand they need to take the lead and manage instant messaging before an unstoppable snowball creates a problem.

As an IT manager you need to understand this method of communication right now. The first thing you need to do is develop your company's policy. The areas that need to be addressed with policy are: authorization to use, storage & professionalism.

Currently sources estimate that 75 million people use instant messaging at work. Of those 2/3s were using the free downloaded consumer versions (2). The interesting statistic is the estimate that 1/3 of those 75 million are using instant messenger with out the knowledge of their respective IS departments (3).
Banning instant messaging may be impractical but you need to form a written policy stating what is and is not acceptable.

If your company is sued your email communication could be subpoenaed. Public companies in particular have had to keep copies of their written communications for seven years. Up until recently this meant letters, etc. but now this includes emails and instant messages. Kept up with the Martha Stewart trial and the Enron debacle? Both have hinged on stored email correspondence. Regardless if you're a private company the rule still needs to be applied. Two companies go to court and one has the records and one doesn't, guess who wins.

The third area is professionalism. Because of its ease-of-use email and instant messaging sometimes suffer from a breakdown in the level of courtesy shown.

Instant messaging is just another form of communication and we humans love to communicate so it makes perfect sense that this technology will work it's way from a teenage group dating tool to a business tool.

Bibliography

(1) IDG News Service, "MS Puts A Price On It's Enterprise IM Product", by Joris Evers, 8/11/03.
(2) San Jose Mercury News, "IM At Your Service" by Margaret Steen
(3) San Jose Mercury News, "IM At Your Service" by Margaret Steen

About Bob Boyles and Smarter Distribution:

Bob Boyles started his strategic consulting business in 2001 and has focused on the change that technology is forcing in the supply chain and how independent distributors can not only respond to that change but also maximize the return they are seeing on their investment. Bob has spent a significant amount of time as an Installation Consultant for several of the big name software companies in the distribution market. Working with hundreds of distributors across the country on installing, upgrading and utilizing their software. Bob also worked as Corporate Systems Manager for one of the largest electrical wholesalers in the country.

Bob is a graduate of Appalachian State University (BS - 1981) and University of North Carolina at Greensboro Graduate School of Business (MBA - 1985).

© Copyright 2003, Robert S Boyles Jr. All rights reserved. This article cannot be reprinted or reproduced in whole or in part, without the express written permission of Robert S Boyles, Jr.