This article easily wins my "Best Title of the Month" award (OK, it doesn't exist, but this title is pretty clever, isn't?).
However, the contents are more conventional. The story focuses on the popularity of instant messaging and its inherent dangers.
Businesses have at least three reasons to fear instant messaging, not so different from e-mail in that regard: the liability from notes that come back to haunt the company, lost productivity as employees chat the day away, and the blocking of the network's pipes as conversations drag on.
Even with these fears, companies are using it: even IBM.
Michael Loria, director of advanced collaboration at the Cambridge offices of IBM, has been studying the way workers communicate. Early results, he says, show that employees find that messaging is a more helpful communication than e-mail, and often better than the telephone. About half of IBM's 300,000 employees use a combination of the company's Lotus Sametime IM system and AOL Instant Messenger, sending 2.5 million messages a day. Their "buddy lists" are integrated, meaning a co-worker and a parent could be on the same list.
Loria has seen firsthand how pervasive the communication has become. When he wants to talk to a co-worker, his first impulse is not to pick up the phone or walk over to a neighboring office, but to check out his buddy list to see if that person's name is in green, meaning he's online. He also uses instant messaging to talk to his wife and kids.
Loria figures allowing AOL into the IBM mix helps users become more comfortable with the system because it makes them feel they can talk to anyone who's important to them; it becomes part of their culture. He's not a fan of systems that only allow communication among one company and says the concept of proprietary systems makes his hair stand on end.
Source: Shannon Henry, The Washington Post, July 21, 2002
5:49:31 PM
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