Presence, corporate culture and personal preference
Presence - the ability to know another's status - is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to know when someone is at their desk and is likely available for interaction in real time. Presence can serve as a sort of informal time clock that allows you to know when co-workers have arrived in the morning. It can allow you to get questions answered quickly and easily using an instant messaging client, for example.
However, unlike store-and-forward technologies like email or voicemail, presence requires the right corporate culture and the right mindset for organizations to derive the greatest value from it. As most users of an instant messaging system will admit, receiving an IM at an inopportune time is usually more irritating than helpful, which has resulted in the ability to selectively provide presence information only to specific individuals or groups in a variety of clients.
More importantly, however, is the role of personal preference in the success of presence. For example, do you really want others to know your presence at all times - when you're at your desk, on a mobile device, when you've turned on your laptop, etc.? For those that resist the publication of this data, how do you convince them to embrace the benefits of presence?
posted by Michael D. Osterman at
3/23/2008 12:13:00 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Michael
First, full disclosure: I am the CEO of FaceTime Communications - we provide solutions that help secure and manage the use of IM and other RTC in the enterprise.
Before I joined FaceTime, I was COO at a French telecommunications company where one of our biggest challenges was collaborating with a globally dispersed management team. Imagine holding staff meetings where team members are separated by as many as 16 hours.
We decided to use IM to facilitate better communication. There was a great deal of trepidation initially - people were concerned that they would get bombarded by frivolous messages. There was also concern over privacy - as you mention.
However, the culture adapted remarkably fast and within a couple of months IM became an indispensable part of the communication fabric.
Voicemails plummeted - although, sadly, not e-mail. People could see when you logged on in the AM or were working after hours and could reach you for quick discussions.
We also found that, contrary to expectations, people treated IM much like the phone - they didn't ping you unless it was something important.
To net it out, there was nothing special we did with respect to culture or mindset. Once IM was introduced it got adopted quickly and the etiquette around its use developed naturally.
When I speak with our customers today, most of who are large enterprises, I find they have the same experience: IM tends to spread rapidly and people adapt to it naturally!
Kailash
March 24, 2008 6:19 PM
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