More IT departments turning against IM

Our most recent instant messaging tracking survey, completed at the end of March, shows that the percentage of businesses using instant messaging remains relatively unchanged from our previous tracking survey six months ago – but interestingly, IT attitudes toward instant messaging appear to be changing.

About 40% of enterprises are using instant messaging for business applications and another 9% are planning to do so. The percentage of enterprises using instant messaging has remained steady at 84%, as has the percentage of users employing instant messaging, with 18% of e-mail users also using instant messaging.

However, while 36% of IT departments support instant messaging in our current survey, up slightly from six months ago, 27% of IT departments now oppose instant messaging use in their organizations, up sharply from only 19% that opposed it six months ago.

This is likely due to the growing maturation of instant messaging use within many organizations, which has resulted in an increased awareness of the potential security and namespace control problems that can be caused by the use of consumer-grade instant messaging clients in an enterprise setting.

In the current survey, we added two questions about instant messaging standards. If an enterprise purchasing decision for instant messaging were made today, 49% of respondents (IT staff members) said standards would play a “very important” role in the decision, while another 17% said that standards would be “extremely important.” However, only 9% of respondents understand the differences between the competing instant messaging standards, and only 1% have decided which standard represents the best approach for their organization. Not surprisingly, IT staff members in large organizations (with more than 1,000 e-mail users) tend to be more knowledgeable about instant messaging standards that their counterparts in smaller organizations.

Highlights from this study can be found at: https://www.ostermanresearch.com/results/surveyresults_im0104.htm