that's it?

You said: "The most commonly cited reason is that no one has yet made a sufficiently strong business case for enterprise instant messaging"

That's true but misleading. Sometimes there isn't a really strong business case. Perhaps most of the employees are in a single office, perhaps they don't tend to communicate between offices much or perhaps the age of the average employees (business drivers) is such that they are not interested in IM technology.

In our case, we're going to install the Sametime Limited Edition client because it's FREE with Domino. This will allow the business to use the system and hopefully, find our own business reasons for use without the need to win a business case for funding.

I'm surprised at the findings. The organizations I know that use instant messaging swear by it -- but they would never have known that till they actually tried it.

Dennis McDonald
http://www.ddmcd.com

IT took the idea of IM to records and legal. The response we got back, was you must be nuts. From their standpoint, if you have information digitally, you must retain it for 7 years, and produce it when a public records request comes in. The idea of not using IM for non-city business was floated. Legal said if it is for non-city business, why waste resources on it? You can't guarantee that people will not use it for city business, so you have to retain and produce it anyway. That is a lot more compelling reason for our municipality than some IT guy can't see the business case.

Our company has a business case for IM, but it is meeting strong opposition from people who fear that employees will spend more time chatting with co-workers and less time working.

We initially used a commercial product that was cutomized for internal use. I guess it was a success as we have moved to MS LCS, again customized to our specs. All that is allowed is text messages and desktop collaboration. Even urls are converted to text.
One thing to note is that NOTHING is saved under the new system, it is just a comms link.

There was a note earlier saying that once it was digital it needed to be saved for 7 years, I wonder if they have IP phones.

This system can be a great aid when working on large comms problems - quite often in parallel to the monster conference call which has too many chiefs wanting airtime. The work gets done while they rant and rave. It does help to have a large desktop screen area for many more windows tho.

My workgroup has members spread across North America, this really helps communications with them (even if they are in the same office)