* Lost laptops can cost jobs
Last October, I was involved in a client’s advisory board meeting in New York and sat next to a senior manager from a large, U.S.-based company. That company’s senior management, concerned about the potential breach of sensitive data resulting from the loss of company laptop computers, issued an edict that all laptops had to be secured within a period of two months. Any laptop that was lost after that time and that was not equipped with appropriate encryption software would result in the immediate firing of the employee who lost it.
That’s a good example of a profound business case for technology: implement it or risk getting fired.
However, there are a variety of messaging technologies for which such a profound business case is a tougher sell. For example, in talking with someone the other day from a leading provider of enterprise instant messaging (EIM) systems, that individual related that they are seeing a somewhat soft market for EIM and presence, softer than what many people might have anticipated a few years ago.
Part of the issue is that many IT departments and business units have not yet found a really compelling reason to implement EIM and presence technologies, perhaps because they just don’t see enough business benefit from them relative to the other technologies they are faced with implementing. For example, a messaging decision-maker is faced with perhaps 15 different initiatives, technologies, etc. and must prioritize among them. If decision-makers in an organization have to solve problems around image-spam, phishing, spyware, archiving, policy creation and enforcement, outbound content filtering, e-discovery, etc., they will be less likely to consider the benefits of EIM and presence simply because these technologies are too far down the list to be addressed in the near term.
The key for vendors, then, is to move EIM and presence up the list through the marketing of a clear business case for these technologies. We are currently conducting a survey of prospective EIM and presence customers in North America and will have some results to share on this topic in the next couple of weeks.
