Instant Messaging
I had an interesting philosophical discussion with a co-worker this morning about instant messaging applications – and their usefulness as a tool in the workplace.
Following recent rumblings within my workplace about the idea of all staff installing and using Windows Live Messenger, we are wondering what it’s pro’s and cons might be.
Pros
- Immediate access to contacts
- Silent, immediate access to contacts
- Broadcast your availability through your “status” or “presence” in the IM application
Cons
- Disruption
- You need to be logged on for it to work
- Everybody needs to use the same application
If immediate access to somebody is required, what stops you using the telephone (or visiting their desk)? If you need to send somebody a file, or a link, what stops you using email?
After cancelling out availability and disruption, the most plausible benefit of using instant messaging appears to be letting others know where you are and what you are doing – but then this only works if you logged in at some point during the day to update it.
It strikes me that a much more sensible system would be something like Twitter, Jaiku (recently acquired by Google) or Pownce – that let people inform others once of their status or “presence”, and then be read many times by many people.
There is crossover with shared calendars. If you want to find out what co-workers are up to, you can always look at the calendar in Outlook – but this relies on them having kept their calendar up-to-date. The same problem will exist for any “presence” broadcasting system.
The Outlook option would be persuasive if a solution existed to open everybody’s calendar and just show what they say they are up to now, and perhaps later. This would of course have to be built, because no such “view” exists in Outlook.
