The future of enterprise Instant Messaging

Enterprise Instant Messaging (IM) is gaining popularity, as corporates begin to buy into the benefits of using IM over e-mail or voice mail. Dr Uday Shukla tells us how instant messaging makes the job easier

At a time when "the next big thing" often turns out to be yesterday’s news or to go up in a puff of smoke, instant messaging has a real future as a key component of enterprise IT. But that future has to do with a great deal more than express-lane e-mail: Instant Messaging has the potential to revolutionise communication, data-sharing, and collaboration by making these workplace activities significantly more productive.

Consider where enterprise IM is right now: It’s growing at approximately 20 percent annually, and is expected to be in use by 70 percent of all companies by the end of this year. By 2005, it’s expected to surpass e-mail as the primary online communication tool.

Research shows that this is happening for a reason. At IBM, 77 percent of employees say that IM has changed the way they communicate, lessening the time they must spend with e-mail and voice-mail, on the phone, and in face-to-face communications. More than 80 percent of IBM employees say that instant messaging makes their job easier. Among IBM’s clients who have IM, more than 75 percent say that the technology makes them more productive.

Now, imagine the future of IM. It will embrace "in-context" communications in which the names of all the people involved in a document, piece of data, or video file are attached to that work as live links. Thus, if you have a question about the document, run your cursor over a name to find out if the individual is online; if he or she is, just click to send an instant query—and watch productivity skyrocket. This "contextual collaboration" can be extended to partners, suppliers, and key customers at the discretion of the enterprise.

What do we have to do to ensure that enterprise Instant Messaging reaches its full potential? First, we must understand that IM’s success is dependent upon three key factors: interoperability, security, and community selection.

Interoperability—the capability for people with different systems to communicate with one another—has been a problem for consumer IM, mainly because those applications are advertising-driven and thus need to be proprietary to create value. This artificial restriction is contrary to IM’s network effect, which dictates that its value increases as each additional user is added to the network. Consumer Instant Messaging services are swimming upstream against this fundamental principle.

It is therefore imperative that enterprise Instant Messaging operates transparently and seamlessly, no matter what software or operating system is being used, and that open technology standards be applied as IM evolves. In this way, each organisation’s adoption of Instant Messaging will add value to the overall network—inside and outside the enterprise firewall.

Speaking of firewalls, security is clearly a concern with IM, just as it is with e-mail. While more companies are adding encryption to their Instant Messaging offerings to boost security, encryption is just the tip of the iceberg. In order to provide enhanced security, Instant Messaging systems must authenticate users by confirming their identities based on a trusted source such as a corporate directory, so that we always know that the people we’re chatting with are really who they say they are.

Related to security is the idea of community selection. Instant Messaging software must give the enterprise the flexibility to choose the community of people who will be included in the network. This may include anyone in a partner organisation, certain customers, or key individuals at supplier companies. Selectivity can greatly enhance security, but it must be network-friendly and function easily and transparently.

In considering these key elements of enterprise IM, two things stand out. First, this is all possible from an IT perspective; there are no technological impediments preventing Instant Messaging from reaching its full potential. Second, if there are any obstacles, they will come from the IT industry’s failure to agree upon the open standards necessary to make Instant Messaging a success. The industry has made significant progress in applying open standards to other IT applications. There is no doubt that we can set aside partisanship in this area as well and work together to build enterprise Instant Messaging technologies that will benefit us all.

The author is director, IBM Software Labs, India. He can be contacted at ushukla@in.ibm.com