Why Would Employees Use Public Instant Messaging (IM) Networks Unofficially?

This past Saturday, I wrote about the problems faced by AOL Instant Messenger users when close to 10,000 active users were accidentally deleted. Stephen O'Grady thought I was a bit harsh in my view that companies deserved "what they got" if they relied on public networks for their business IM needs. In some ways, I acknowledged he was correct and that I should have focused on the "whys" of this scenario.

An offshoot of this is why employees get driven to use Public IM Networks and a response to my posting on David Morgenstern's opinion piece at eWeek asking why he did not feel the IBM Instant Messaging was a winner along with Microsoft and its Office Live Communications Server 2005 platform. The following response from another reader provides a clear example of how companies may shoot themselves in the foot if they do not recognize the business need/use for IM, and put acceptable use policies in place that offer some flexibility while protecting the enterprise.

My employer experimented with Sametime, but many employees found the management-imposed rules for use simply too cumbersome to get any real work done within various groups of our large IT department. Email was impractical on "crash carts" equipped with laptops running Microsoft that were to be expected to be used by any SysAdmin, Contractor, Vendor, or Operator due to security issues, and the only phone service was patchy cell (if it was a SysAdmin with an authorized cell contact) or cordless phones within the data centers (4 total on the premises)that would fade out whenever you walked between 2 large pieces of hardware or were drowned out by background noise.

The solution for instantaneous queries between paeons in different groups in different locations, including crash carts and some Microsoft servers in front of the firewall, was thought of by some of the brighter operators: AIM. We could give our managers the answers they wanted within a minute of them asking for status updates, tell the Help Desk if there were any outages they needed to be aware of, and notify Level 2 & 3 Support of crashes before they got the system-generated, converted to email, forwarded to whichever wireless device page, which could take up to 15 minutes - not acceptable for notification and initial response. We could also communicate effectively with Support people dialed in from home, which also included shift leaders wanting a "heads up" before they walked in to pandemonium.  ( Original Link )

Some questions come to mind about this response. First, what was it about the rules that made Sametime too cumbersome to get work done? Why did the users not raise the ease of use issue with management? If they did, how did management respond? Why did the company not have filters in place to block Public IM traffic? If the did allow it, were there policies in place about its use? Why did they not looking at opening the AIM gateway in Sametime? Why did this user feel that a Public IM client was any more secure than e-mail on the"crash carts"?

To me, this is a classic example of what should not happen in an organization and offers a real-life example for other organizations. I will post these questions on that site and see what kind of response they generate.