Fighting FUD: So Your Boss Hates IM
Thursday morning of Lotusphere
2006 brought the 2nd incarnation
of "GURUPalooza". This session puts all the speakers in the Best
Practices track on the stage for panel questions and I was honored again
to be part of this great group of people. The question of the day (for
me at least) came from someone whose boss was saying that they had to "rip-out"
Sametime Instant Messaging because
a) it was being misused by employees to talk about football scores and
what not and b) it was mandated by the auditors. I do not have time to
go into more detail here because I really need to get some sleep, but my
bottom-line answer to this person was that his boss is just plain wrong
and he could call me at any time to be set straight. It turns out that
this person works in the insurance industry, which is notoriously slow
in adopting technology of ANY kind. What floored me that he was one of
5 people who came up to me after the session with the same issue (3 from
the insurance industry). So until I am able to write more fully on this
question, I encourage them and anyone else facing this FUD-based
issue to read my previous
posts on the topic. They should
also point their bosses to "Instant
Upside, Instant Downside",
published in the insurance industry trade magazine Risk
and Insurance. This one quote
in this publication sums it up best:
"Turning instant messaging off is a head-in-the-sand solution, because
it can reap major benefits".
Comment posted by Scott Gentzen01/28/2006 11:32:28 AM
Homepage: http://www.scottandmargo.net
Where I'm working, (US DoD) our IT org has been committed to Sametime and using it for years (since 2.x or so). We're not a huge group, but we have about 1600 people scattered around different buildings, with a few hundred more in other parts of the country and contractors which sould be anywhere.
I found the "rip it out" discussion interesting, because I'm finding that the DoD is embracing this kind of instant collaboration capability. Defense Collaboration Tool Set (DCTS) is a DISA-level standardization framework for collaborative software and Sametime is on that list. The US Navy has a program called "Collaboration at Sea" which makes use of Sametime in ship-to-ship communications and awareness, etc. (both of which are on the IBM Case Studies area somewhere)
In my particular area, we're not getting pushback on Sametime because of productivity issues....we're getting pushback from the network security group and some of the users. A large percentage of our users don't want to use it at all, and we're actually winning people over on that over the years. Network security still has us locked down to IM-only and no file sharing...which is kind of a pain and not helpful in selling the use of Sametime internally when you're only using a small part of its capabilities.
A tool like Sametime is more of a cultural shift than a lot of other software out there, I think. It's kind of like blogging...some people just aren't going to get it. Though, sometimes you can get the right people in the right places at the right time to realize the gains that you get with that kind of contact between your users. I've been fortunate to be able to witness a shift like that in my career and it's kinda cool. 
01/30/2006 05:15:12 PM
Comment posted by Curt Stone01/30/2006 05:09:12 PM
Homepage: http://curtstone.dominodeveloper.net
I appreciate this post Chris. I work in the insurance industry. We're just rolling out SameTime with the Notes 6.5 client. I agree with your slow adoption of technology opinion. I'm seeing some good activity around the SameTime meetings and the rollout of the SameTime client in Notes 6 should accelerate the chat usage.