A year ago, if instant messaging (IM) was present at all in the workplace, it was most likely to be viewed as a drain on productivity. Like Internet chat rooms (and not altogether inaccurately), IM was characterized as a domain populated by teenagers, hackers, and purveyors of cybersex. It hasn't taken long, however, for this scenario to alter radically: The once dismissed medium of the instant message has now become an object of interest, controversy, and investment for a growing number of businesses.
The best proof of IM's growing demographic is the much publicized turf war among vendors of IM technology, most notably over the position of market leader America Online. The fervor with which companies like AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo are pursuing these battles, despite the fact that few if any are presently drawing revenues from their services, is similarly a sign that IM's potential is far from fully realized. In the business environment, deployment of IM is still largely unauthorized by official channels. But that hasn't stopped scores of users from downloading the clients to their PCs and chatting with friends, colleagues, and co-workers. What these users, vendors, and, increasingly, planners of corporate IT and MIS strategies are finding is that IM can offer degrees of efficiency, effectiveness, and versatility that, at least in certain contexts, far surpass both telephony and e-mail.
While instant messaging is typically referred to as a "realtime" medium, in contrast to the asynchronicity of e-mail messages, it nonetheless operates on a distinctly different order of immediacy from a telephone conversation. What makes IM unique is not just the specific form of messages exchanged between users, typically short and text-based, but also the context in which these messages are initiated and processed. Most IM clients, for example, use e-mail-like addressing and exchange mechanisms, though for now, these mechanisms are mainly proprietary and non-interoperable across various clients. Unlike e-mail, however, a user ID for instant messaging refers to more than a static destination or message repository. Rather, IM addresses are intimately tied to presence, or the user's availability and willingness to send and receive messages.
The concept of presence holds innumerable theoretical and practical possibilities, extending to almost any form of communication. But in current IM applications, presence takes a very concrete form - the "buddy list." Popularized by AOL and supported by its acquired ICQ software, the buddy list in its most basic form consists of a list of users who are shown to be either online or offline at a given point in time. This information is published to other users who have subscribed to the service, and who, in most cases, have been authorized by their "buddies" to be so informed. When one subscriber sees that another is online, she can initiate an instant messaging session, typically by double-clicking on the name from her buddy list.
Different clients, of course, include different levels of functionality. Yahoo's Instant Messenger, for instance, lets users enter and display custom status messages to their buddies while online. Other systems offer default settings for "busy" mode or the ability to generate auto-replies to indicate that a user is online but not available. Some instant messengers integrate with e-mail clients, or include their own e-mail-like methods for reaching users who are not online at the time a message is sent. Most allow for multi-party "conferences," or what amount to on-the-fly private chat rooms, as well as one-to-one communication between users.
By making the status and availability of individual users known before any communication is attempted, buddy lists facilitate a realtime, or almost realtime, communications environment that is at once more effective and less obtrusive than a telephone call. Naturally, an IM message that "knows" that an addressee is available has a much better chance of reaching that person than a phone call, which more often than not ends up dropped into voicemail. At the same time, an IM session is typically less obtrusive than a phone conversation, because IM demands much less of a monopoly on the attention of its participants. Both because the medium is generally simple text, and because the exchange of presence information creates an essentially "open" channel for communication between users who are online, IM accommodates more of a free form, loosely structured style of conversation than the telephone. In addition, the fact that IM clients are usually lightweight and PC-based allows them more easily to integrate with a user's desktop environment.
Combined, these characteristics comprise a medium that is particularly well-suited to active collaboration and to informal but important exchanges of ideas and information among users in a distributed work environment - scenarios that make up an integral part of any knowledge worker's daily routine.
IM In (And Beyond) The Enterprise
While demand for instant messaging and presence services in a business context might be obvious, implementation at this point is not such a simple matter. Security issues have concerned many enterprise network managers, and prompted some to prohibit the use of third-party, Internet-based messengers on users' desktops altogether. Even if corporate users are permitted to download the popular commercial clients, most firewalls will tend to disrupt, if not completely block, their functionality.
Some solutions to these challenges have been offered in the way of privately-hosted IM servers, created explicitly for enterprise use. Companies like Lotus and Microsoft have approached this area as an extension of the messaging and groupware environment, and both offer client/server products (SameTime for Lotus and Exchange Conferencing Server 2000 for Microsoft) that integrate IM and other collaboration tools with their existing message servers. Other vendors, such as ICQ, have adapted their consumer-based products to the enterprise environment, while newer market entrants such as Jabber.com (Denver, CO - 303-308-3231) are focussed on building extensible platforms capable of working IM and presence into a range of business processes.
Jabber's product vision, which builds on open source development and leverages XML (see sidebar: "Talk To Me"), hints at the direction of most commercial IM offerings. The company plans to offer three different versions of its IM server: one for small businesses, which can be hosted by the customer or by Jabber; one for larger enterprises, which includes LDAP and proxy support in addition to its core functionality; and one for service providers (ISPs, ASPs, carriers), which adds high degrees of fault tolerance and support for mainframe operating systems.
While most of today's consumer IM offerings are free, the prospect of selling into enterprises, either directly or through an ASP model, provides a clear profit opportunity. Security is certainly one important requirement in this respect, but customizable and differentiated feature and service offerings will add significant value to business-grade products. Jabber, for example, has proposed a variety of business-to-business and consumer-to-business applications of its technology, like online customer interaction and realtime auctions. Contact centers are a natural fit for the concept, where text-based IM can be used as a simple and less intimidating mode of communication between online shoppers and agents, as well as a way to proactively "push" customer service and marketing efforts.
