IM on CIOs' New Year's wishlist

Instant messaging is ready for businesses to use - and if IT directors don't pick it up quickly, end users will adopt it in spite of them, according to the Gartner Group.

This is one of the 10 New Year resolutions CIOs are being urged to make by the analyst firm.

John Mahoney, vice president and research director at Gartner, said: "IM is a technique that clearly allows people to collaborate more quickly. There is a set of vendors that is ready to offer safe IM for corporates."

If CIOs don't seize the initiative it is likely that staff will move to install IM themselves, taking the running of IT further out of the management's hands.

Mahoney said: "In some call centres, intelligent staff install IM themselves, if their PCs aren't locked down, in order to do their job better, sharing information while on a call."

Although Gartner believes the current IT recession will last into 2004, IT directors or CIOs should treat it as an opportunity to make their companies more efficient and raise their profile in the company, said Mahoney. IT should help management make decisions more quickly, moving towards what Gartner is currently calling the "real time enterprise", he said.

The suggestion to adopt IM was one of ten recommended "New Year's resolutions" for CIOs (see http://www.silicon.com/a56810 for the full list).

Peter Judge writes for ZDNet.co.uk