* Watching the four user groups of instant messaging
A relatively new enterprise technology like instant messaging has four basic groups of users, and watching one group closely can help you predict how things will go for the other three.
The groups are:
1. The leading-edge users who were early adopters of the technology and are now looking to get more value out of it.
2. The mainstream users who have been using the technology for a while and use it regularly for day-to-day business processes.
3. Later adopters who have started using instant messaging only recently.
4. The naysayers who don’t yet see a need for instant messaging.
I like to think of these four groups as a sort of misshapen bell curve that moves along the axis of time – Group 2 will eventually acquire the needs of Group 1, Group 3 will acquire the needs of Group 2, and so forth. Even most members in Group 4 will eventually adopt instant messaging.
The value of looking at instant messaging use in this way is that Group 1 becomes the driving force for what the other three groups will eventually do with instant messaging, serving as a sort of leading indicator for future instant messaging use.
For example, enterprises looking to get more value out of their instant messaging investment will look to the integration of instant messaging with line-of-business applications to create a synergy. That’s what many early adopters in Group 1 are currently doing.
The recent integration of AOL’s enterprise-grade instant messaging system with PeopleSoft’s application and portal offerings is a good example of the direction in which leading-edge instant messaging is going. In this particular integration, users of PeopleSoft are able to communicate with other users from within the applications instead of having to use separate applications. Another example is the J.D. Edwards Collaborative Portal, which allows users to collaborate and message each other using Lotus QuickPlace and Lotus Sametime.
In short, many early adopters of instant messaging in the enterprise are now looking at ways of getting more value from their investment. For those that have implemented line-of-business applications, the integration of these applications with instant messaging is a logical way of doing just that.
