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Unified communication case studies at your fingertips. Case studies are the next best thing to being there. Learn how others overcame the expected and the unexpected challenges of a UC deployment in our case studies.

In many cases, policy requirements will dictate the platform chosen in the first place. For example, a financial firm that faces strict SEC scrutiny might choose a tool like IBM Lotus Sametime, which faithfully records and archives all conversations for compliance purposes.

A less regulated business looking to connect to the outside world might gain more by simply adopting a corporate policy for one of the commercial IM services, like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo! Instant Messenger.

The instant messaging ROI

Regardless of the chosen instant messaging solution, employee education on the right instant messaging mix can be critical to seeing a strong unified communications ROI, more so than with other communications platforms.

"It's important for users to understand the importance of one tool over another," said Zeus Kerravala, a senior vice president at Yankee Group.

For example, he said, an instant message is great for getting a quick response back from a person, while an email is often more effective when sending information to a group of people. If available, desktop video can help bridge distances when building corporate relationships.

The "soft value" in improved productivity can be hard to gauge, but it often warrants the investment by itself.

In some cases, that productivity can be translated to dollar savings if pre- and post-implementation metrics are kept, like problem resolution times in a help desk scenario.

Enterprises can actually cut costs, too, by getting the right mix of communications technology. For instance, as employees message one another rather than pick up the phone, long-distance and international calling charges will go down.

Another hard savings can be found in reduced email archiving costs.

Irwin Lazar, vice president of communications research for Nemertes Research, said adopting instant messaging slowed the growth of archived email by 15% to 20% at several companies he has contacted.

That is one hard instant messaging ROI that Ron Willbanks, director of IT at Whataburger Restaurants, is hoping for as he begins trialing adoption of instant messaging with WebEx internally.

Willbanks said that short missives -- the thank you's, receipt confirmations, and quick questions -- often contributed to a surprising amount of email archival overhead.

"I used to see the disk space utilization reports, and a lot of it was relating to Exchange," he said. "It would be a distinct advantage for us to not have to store that much."

Increasing instant messaging adoption

But both hard benefits, like reduced email to archive, and soft benefits, like improved efficiency, require employee acceptance of instant messaging in order to succeed.

Some usage will come naturally, but large-scale adoption may require some prodding.

"The younger workers tend to expect IM and will use it if available," Lazar said. "Older workers often go slower."

To increase usage, Lazar recommended a management imperative: If workers have a question, for example, managers could make themselves available via instant message but not via email.

"That tends to spur adoption," he said.

It also might make the lives of managers a little easier, as research shows that the typical knowledge worker spends more than two hours a day on email.

"If we can get them off of that, maybe we can increase productivity," Willbanks said.

Instant messaging pitfalls

But analysts caution that in addition to educating about the benefits of instant messaging, it's just as important to warn about the dangers.

For example, Kerravala encountered a brokerage horror story at one firm where an employee passed along a buy order to a trader via an instant message. The trader accidentally closed the message before reading it, leaving the customer to wonder, several days later, why the purchase was not made at the desired price.

"Any kind of critical information, don't use IM," Kerravala said. "It's just not confirmed delivery."

He also warned that sensitive data, even if sent over secure connections, was too easy to misdirect accidentally by clicking the wrong name.

"Imagine doing that with sales quotas or a personnel review," he said. Instead, he recommended emailing such information: Though such gaffes are still possible, they are less likely.

Lazar said it was also important to educate employees that -- unlike on a personal instant messaging network -- conversations were not necessarily private and might be preserved for posterity by an internal archiving solution.

"People need to know the archiving and retention policies around instant messaging," he said.

Both experts said that training sessions were appropriate, particularly if the material could be geared toward electronic communications generally, with ongoing concerns highlighted as they came up.

And for helping reduce incidents like the brokerage snafu, Kerravala suggested polling workers for their own horror stories and sharing best practices on an internal document or wiki. When integrating instant messaging into business processes, implementing the right policies and offering comprehensive education on use can be as important as buying the right technology in seeing an instant messaging return on investment.

Instant messaging (IM) -- whether companies view it as a worker productivity booster or a security threat -- is a popular communication application that many workers use, with or without permission, on corporate networks.

In a recent report from Burton Group, "Instant Messaging: It's Not Just Idle Chatter," current trends of IM communications in the enterprise are highlighted -- including the necessity of creating policies to govern the use of IM within a company.

In addition, according to Burton Group analyst Diana Kelley, enterprises that do not intend to implement instant messaging should still create a policy that outlines the reasons for disallowing the use of IM on the corporate network.

Equally important in creating policies regarding IM, companies need to prepare the logistics of enforcing these policies -- whether that means utilizing network analytics tools, archiving, or using IT staff to patrol the network for violations.

"It is important to understand what an enterprise wants their specific approach to instant messaging to be and to create a policy that they will employ with IM use -- even if an enterprise chooses not to utilize IM in the workplace," Kelley said.

Financial institutions -- early adopters in the field of IM communications -- continue to lead the charge in employing best practices of IM use in the workplace, including enforcement of strong usage policies.

Many other early adopters of the technology indicate that presence is a major driver in implementation and continued use of IM. For help desk facilities, CRM centers and many hospitals, IM and presence allow staff to efficiently locate the correct and available person for situations that require an immediate response.

Because IM can return an immediate response and illustrate a person's availability, many companies are convinced that it is a business tool that can and does improve worker productivity. In vertical fields such as hospitals, IM allows staff to immediately find an available doctor or nurse whose specialization is suited for a specific emergency rather than wasting valuable time waiting for returned calls or emails to determine whether a doctor is available.

Yet deciding whether to use a public or private IM service is an issue that continues to delay deployment in some cases. Issues of security, archiving and management control must be considered when making the choice between enterprise instant messaging (EIM), such as IBM's Sametime, and public IM services, such as AOL Instant Messaging and MSN Messenger.

The Burton Group report indicates that security issues are complicated and require enterprises to give consideration to how much control is necessary for the security of their business.

"When using a public instant messaging service," Kelley said, "use of security gateways and reflection of conversations between internal users can help to diminish the amount of internal conversations making it onto the external network and into a public IM's server archives, though these measures are not 100% certain."

Instant messaging in the corporate environment will continue to expand as the incoming workforce settles in. Many new employees are dependent on the use of IM to finish projects. Also, these workers are often more comfortable using IM instead of email to stay in contact with project members and fellow workers. Many enterprises will have to rethink the use of IM in the workplace as these workers begin to make their mark on the business or industry.

Kelley reiterated that enterprises need to be mindful that IM is now in the enterprise and is an important part of the way many employees work -- and that people are using it for more than just making lunch plans.

Instant messaging is a valuable business tool for some enterprises. For others, it's a security risk. Either way, a recent Burton Group report suggests that all companies should have an IM usage policy, even if they haven't deployed IM yet.