Of all the grassroots movements in recent memory to take hold in corporate IT, none has caught on so rapidly or tenaciously as instant messaging.

With a purely consumer-oriented genesis, AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) and Yahoo's Messenger service were never designed for the job to which corporate users happily applied them. It is with interest that we note the recent passing of Yahoo's business-class offering as Yahoo's vice president, ironically named Steve Boom, announced that for Yahoo business IM had gone bust.

Given that from my own unofficial and completely unscientific anecdotal evidence, IM is going anything but bust - something seems amiss. Where is the disconnect? To a large extent, it perhaps can be traced to a case of "fixing what ain't broken" combined with the radically different way that IM "went corporate."

Not since corporate users began their battle with mainframe-centric IT departments (then called MIS) in the early 1980s by buying and deploying departmental Novell NetWare LANs, have I seen a tail-wagging-the-dog situation such as this one surrounding IM. (Although, the surreptitious introduction of wireless is a close runner-up.)

Because a service such as AIM required no central IT involvement, it only required the IT department to do nothing - something I'm sure many end users would claim their IT departments are expert at.

One could claim without exaggeration that IM was a classic Trojan horse. All along, corporate IT was vigilantly guarding the perimeter courtesy of firewall technology. Based on the assumption that all questionable traffic would emanate from without, few companies concerned themselves with traffic emanating from within.

Thus, "implementing" IM at corporate simply meant going to work, downloading the IM program and logging on. Instantly you could communicate with existing members, and it took only minutes to get your uninitiated colleagues to follow suit. Given the general lack of visibility most network managers have to individual application flows, they were most likely blissfully unaware that this was taking place. They were being "wagged" without even knowing it.

Not willing to leave well enough alone, the vendor community came to the rescue of the IT manager - or so they thought.