Managing IM: Keep E-mail As Fallback In Move To Real TimeManaging IM: Keep E-mail As Fallback In Move To Real Time

Bringing instant messaging into the workplace can be tricky. Because the technology got its start among consumers, it's had little oversight from IT departments--and little use as a business tool. But there are things managers need to know about IM as they bring it into their world:

Give your employees what they want. Taking away consumer IM tools doesn't make for happy and productive workers. That's because there's no standard for integration, so different vendors' IM tools can't communicate with each other. If a company gives employees access only to Lotus Sametime, but they've been using Yahoo Messenger, they'll suddenly be cut off from the people they've been messaging most.

Old habits die hard. Few employees are ready to trade E-mail in for IM. Sure, today's 20-somethings will help establish IM as the predominant business-messaging tool sometime in the future, but in the meantime, it's a safer bet for companies to hitch their communications strategy to E-mail. People will still fall back on E-mail for the foreseeable future, Forrester Research VP Dan Rasmus says. "If I can't get you any other way, I'll send you an E-mail."

Destination: integration. IM users dream of a day, destined to arrive soon, when their E-mail and IMs are available in the same view. Not only will that make communications easier to manage, but it also will ease the burden on IT, which won't have to manage separate messaging infrastructures. "Traditionally, synchronous and asynchronous have been treated separately, but increasingly you're seeing them coming together," says Patrick Dorsey, group manager of Sun One communication products at Sun Microsystems, which recently spun off the IM server that had been a component of the vendor's portal server. "Customers are telling us that they want to manage them as a single unit."

Patience pays off. Accepted IM etiquette still hasn't been established, and that can create frustrating inefficiencies. One of the big advantages of IM is also one of its biggest drawbacks: immediacy. When an IM exchange degenerates into half-thoughts confusingly passing back and forth in cyberspace, the resulting dialogues are tougher to follow than a Fellini film.

E-mail continues to provide clearer communication much of the time, largely because its asynchronous nature lets users complete thoughts without being interrupted. Make sure users know that they should do the same in real time.

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