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Instant Messaging Now Enterprise Tool


By Andrew Binstock
May 15, 2002 —  (Page 1 of 3)
It was bound to happen. Every moderately new form of communication gets used by the fringe, the outlaws, the gadget aficionados, the wheeler dealers and finally business workers, in more or less that order. This progressive adoption long predates the advent of computers.

It is believed, sometimes averred, that the first book printed with movable type after Gutenberg's Bible was what passed for pornography in the 15th century. More recently, we know that the widespread acceptance of videotape was a result of pornography's early embrace of the technology, likewise many of those techniques used by sites that require you to acknowledge their ads when browsing. Although pornography has served my purpose here, the larger point is that communications technology has generally been accepted by business after previous adoption by consumers.

Instant messaging (IM) is the next technology to make this transition. Today, employees within corporations are beginning to use IM to perform standard business functions, such as quick communications to supplement workflow tools (or sometimes in lieu of them) and for project management or simply to get around the delays inherent in other forms of communication. Recently, for example, a group of eight Wall Street powerhouses (CS First Boston, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney and UBS Warburg) implemented an IM system among their bond-trading divisions. In the system, traders, dealers and customers can all use IM for direct one-to-one communications. The goal is greater responsiveness to customers. The participating institutions view the added capability of direct customer communication as a competitive benefit that will distinguish them from other institutions that don't offer this level of responsiveness.

Two months ago, the U.S. Navy announced an implementation of IM among allied ships in the Persian Gulf. Using Lotus Domino's Sametime IM product, sailors and officers on one ship can communicate back and forth in near real-time with those on another. Prior to this IM project, if a ship wanted to borrow supplies from a nearby allied ship, the request would have to go up the command chain on the sending ship and down the command chain on the receiving ship. A simple reply of "Yes, we have no bananas" would need to pass through a similar gantlet to be received. Since the Navy system-like the Wall Street system-has built-in automatic logging, encryption, a limitation on who can participate and a block on aliases, the need to vet every message before sending it is removed.

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