Businesses still not compelled to use IM, presence

We have just concluded a major study of instant messaging (IM), presence and real-time communications. Here’s a bit of what we found:

* Among organizations that have not yet deployed enterprise IM as a pilot or in a production environment, the most commonly cited reason for not doing so is that no one has yet made a sufficiently strong business case for enterprise IM. This reason was mentioned far more often than the cost of enterprise IM, concerns about security or managing outbound content.

* Presence will be much more important to most organizations, but it’s not important today. For example, only 19% of organizations told us that the integration of presence into other applications is a high priority now, but that number is expected to be 33% of organizations 12 months from now.

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We have just concluded a major study of instant messaging (IM), presence and real-time communications. Here’s a bit of what we found:

* Among organizations that have not yet deployed enterprise IM as a pilot or in a production environment, the most commonly cited reason for not doing so is that no one has yet made a sufficiently strong business case for enterprise IM. This reason was mentioned far more often than the cost of enterprise IM, concerns about security or managing outbound content.

* Presence will be much more important to most organizations, but it’s not important today. For example, only 19% of organizations told us that the integration of presence into other applications is a high priority now, but that number is expected to be 33% of organizations 12 months from now.

* A key finding from the study is that 75% of organizations told us that one of the primary factors that is holding back greater use of presence is that other priorities are more critical.

IM and presence are today where e-mail was some time around 1995. Back then, you could still find people who were not convinced of the efficacy of e-mail in improving communications and who simply couldn’t come up with a business case for deploying it – today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who does not believe in the value of e-mail for business communications.

What will it take to break the seeming logjam in the IM, presence and real-time communications space? First, vendors will need to develop some really compelling applications that will motivate organizations to give IM and presence a greater role. Jabber, as just one example, has developed some really interesting applications for presence around knowledge management, data routing, emergency response and a variety of other areas.

Second, organizational decision-makers will need to be proactive in understanding what IM and presence can do. As I’ve said before, e-mail’s ubiquity means that organizations can no longer gain any sort of competitive advantage from it. However, that is not the case with IM and presence – innovative use of IM and presence can speed organizational decision-making, provide better customer service, etc., in ways that can provide real competitive advantage simply because many of your competitors are probably not yet using these capabilities.

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