To hear industry pundits tell it, this is the year that instant messaging will really take off in the corporate world. Now that Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online all offer enterprise IM products with integrated security and archiving tools, IM is looking less Mickey Mouse and more like a serious business tool.
Moreover, enterprise IM systems are relatively inexpensive and uncomplicated to deploy to thousands of users, according to CIOs who have done so. Technical support is also pretty much of a no-brainer, and IM's primary business benefit of immediate access to experts and their knowledge is invaluable, especially in industries such as financial services and health care.
"It may be difficult to cost-justify in ROI terms, but it's really hard to ignore IM as a valid communication vehicle," says John Mercante, principal for technology operations at The Vanguard Group, a $600 billion financial services company, that plans to roll out IM companywide after conducting pilot tests in the past year.
Indeed, Gartner estimates that by 2006, IM will be so ubiquitous that it will eclipse e-mail as workers' primary on-the-job communications tool -- with or without the blessing of IT departments. Up until now, experts say, IT groups have largely been in denial about just how deeply unauthorized IM systems have permeated their companies and day-to-day business operations.
Here's a collection of tips and tactics from IT managers at three companies that are ahead of the curve in implementing IM as a serious business tool.
Merrill Lynch & Co.
Twenty-four months ago, "we woke up and discovered we had a significant user base between AOL, MSN and Yahoo IM," says Chief Technology Officer Stephen Norman. "It wasn't exactly a surprise," he quickly adds. "What was much more of a surprise was just how critical IM was to certain pockets of the organization. People were using it to quickly throw details behind a conversation, to complete transactions."
Because IM played such a vital role in daily business, Merrill Lynch could neither prohibit its use nor force traders and other users to switch to a standard enterprise system that might be different from the ones used in their virtual trading communities. Instead, IT had to find ways to secure and archive messages sent and received via multiple Internet-based public IM services. One big driver was compliance with industry regulations, which require financial services firms to record and archive IM messages in the same way they do e-mail.
Because there's no single commercially available tool for managing multiple IM systems or even enabling interoperability between systems, Merrill Lynch developed its own.
"We developed an architecture under which every IM (regardless of which service is used) goes to a common store where we can archive," Norman says. "What we're trying to do is create a layer or front end which will adhere to Merrill Lynch's (security and archiving) guidelines while at the same time provide people with the opportunity to talk to whom they want to."
The company has also expanded IM's use to the IT support function, assigning each worker a designated IT help desk "buddy" who's available on a real-time basis via IM. "It's much quicker and much more interactive," Norman says.
"One of the things you're doing on the help desk is constantly handing a problem from one person to another," he says. "When you're using voice, you have to have a conversation each time. With IM, there's a text history to a conversation that's immediately apparent. There's also an immediacy and friendliness that's not there with e-mail, which are two of the characteristics that make it a good tool for help desks."
Merrill Lynch's advice to other companies deploying IM is to carefully consider its full range of uses as part of developing an overall corporate strategy for the technology. For example, will the IM product's chat function need to be integrated with a Web-based videoconferencing system? Will messaging functions in other applications need to be integrated with the IM system? "IM is extensive, and people need to look at all of its elements as part of their strategy," says Wilson D'Souza, vice president of collaboration and directory services.
Ingersoll-Rand
In 2000, CEO Herb Henkle issued a corporate mandate for disparate business units -- which sell products ranging from Bobcat earth-moving machines to Thermo King refrigerated trucks and Kryptonite locks -- to find synergies across their brands and sales strategies. He also wanted the business units to focus attention on global markets.
That's when enterprise IM took off at the $9 billion company, recalls Peter Thrall, IT project manager in Ingersoll-Rand's global business services group.
"We justified IM by stating it would allow us to increase communications with Asia, Europe and Latin America," Thrall says. The company also had the advantage of already having a single, standard Lotus Notes messaging infrastructure worldwide. For IM, it expanded that system to include Lotus' Sametime chat function.
Devising and putting in place an enterprisewide IM policy has been less straightforward, however. Sametime is the company's official IM tool, yet Ingersoll-Rand doesn't ban employees from using Internet-based IM services, such as AOL Instant Messenger, at least for now. Ingersoll-Rand also doesn't officially archive chat messages, although users can save chat messages as text files.
Inevitably though, this will change. The company is actively working on a new messaging policy that will likely require archiving and prohibit the use of public-domain IM tools within the next year, Thrall says.
In the meantime, the benefits that a standardized enterprise IM system offers -- such as integration with a worldwide corporate e-mail directory -- are making it a lot easier to find people spread across Ingersoll-Rand's eight business units and more than 100 manufacturing facilities.
Lotus' integrated "presence" capability also lets e-mail users know if a colleague is currently on the IM system. If a user is on the system, his name appears in green text in all e-mail from him, to him or about him. If he's on the system but not at his desk, his name appears in yellow text. Though its value is difficult to quantify in dollar terms, that feature is a very important piece of the system, says Thrall.
One way that Ingersoll-Rand has been able to quantify employees' acceptance of a standardized IM system is by its high usage.
"At first, we underestimated our infrastructure because we underestimated IM's growth. We thought we could run everything out of the U.S., so we only set up infrastructure here, but we've had to mimic that infrastructure in Europe and Asia," Thrall reports.
His advice to other IT managers: "Don't fight IM. Develop a strategy for implementation instead. If you don't, others will do it for you by bringing IM in under the radar."
St. Croix Casinos and Hotels
St. Croix Casinos and Hotels first officially tested enterprise IM last year to see if it could help reduce costly phone calls among three of its sites. Calls among the facilities accounted for 60 percent of the company's total monthly long-distance charges.
Before that test, plenty of employees were using IM on company time. "The problem was that it wasn't business-related, and they weren't communicating with each other," says Allen Breeden, systems engineer.
St. Croix opted to standardize on enterprise IM software from Ipswitch. The deployment started with the IT department and a select group of managers who used IM primarily to set up meetings and query colleagues for technical assistance. A year later, more than 200 users are up and running on the software, and long-distance telephone calls among St. Croix sites are down by 60 percent, Breeden says.
Overall, St. Croix considers the IM deployment a success. Still, Breeden cautions IT managers to consider and understand compatibility and integration issues before standardizing on any IM product and scheduling a rollout.
"Because it's a new product, we started out on Version 1.0," he explains. A month later, "we did our first upgrade, but the way we planned on rolling out the client updates didn't work so well," he says. Specifically, the casino's highly dispersed network couldn't accommodate the software's automatic client-update capabilities, so a work-around was needed. Lesson learned: "Make sure you're familiar with all aspects of the product, and test client updates and server updates before deploying beyond a small test environment," Breeden says.
IM Chatter
Nearly 80 percent of instant messaging in companies is done over public IM networks, such as AOL.
-- The Radicati Group.
65 percent of the companies that plan to buy IM products in the next 12 months intend to deploy them to 100 percent of their employees.
-- IDC
"About 10 percent of businesspeople with e-mail accounts now have IM, either illicitly or legally, and use it on an active basis. I wouldn't be surprised to see that number double in 2004."
-- Matt Cain, analyst, Meta Group.