Philip Miller is the global head of the intelligent collaboration group at Formicary. By this I mean, the company is just called Formicary. Philip is in the intelligent collaboration group division.
How many ways can individuals in a single organisation now be contacted? Landline, e-mail, company mobile, smartphone. Then at home: a personal mobile, Facebook account, Twitter, perhaps a Skype/instant messaging address, a landline. The list goes on.
This creates multiple channels over different networks and technologies, some old and some new, each offering an excuse for failing to make contact – “I told you in last week’s e-mail”, or “I left a message on your mobile”.
Unifying all these channels to create a single number – unified communications – is key both to simplification and reclaiming some personal space.
It is a goal that is not just far reaching but in the end should improve the quality of communication, reduce operating costs, be environmentally friendly – by potentially reducing the need for travel – and improve organisational cohesiveness through better team interaction, especially between people in different locations or time zones.
Take the example of persistent group chat, which combines the immediacy of instant messaging with the multi-party outreach offered by e-mail.
Group chat is creating a shift in how people work and communicate, reducing voice and e-mail traffic and can allow teams to operate around the clock in a follow-the-sun manner without losing the thread or context of a conversation.
Group chat also brings “classic knowledge capture” to a company – tapping into the critical knowledge that’s not typically formally documented in writing.
This is the knowledge that individuals hold that might only get discussed and shared over the water cooler, but will walk out the door when that person leaves. Group Chat captures such knowledge in a searchable, reusable format, transforming it into valuable intellectual capital.
This new form of exchange has an impact on the infrastructure. The resulting increase in network traffic puts additional pressure on bandwidth utilisation, quality of service, network management and associated costs. It might also cause other systems to react more slowly.
“Presence”, for example, which is in many ways the lynch-pin of UC as it enables people to see if others are available to be contacted, generates updates throughout the day as a person moves away from, and returns to, their desk, takes a phone call and so on.
Unlike letting a phone ring until it goes through to voicemail, unified communications is directing communications – all of which places a significant extra load on a network probably not designed for such activity.
However, the benefits, when done properly, are compelling. Imagine the deal-winning phone call that gets automatically routed to the mobile because the UC system knows the desk-phone has been not been used for two hours but that the mobile is active, or that an individual is in a meeting but wants to be disturbed for this particular call.
Alternatively, consider the small nugget of information about market conditions that was left in the group chat room by the Asia office which can give the North American office an advantage at the start of the US working day.
It’s vital that organisations embark on a UC project with their eyes wide open. They might be faced with having to throw away much of their current communications equipment so that they can truly realise its benefits.
It might be that they need to pull together an organically grown, perfectly functional, but inefficient system that has much investment already in it.
There may even be internal political pressure not to go down the path at all, but we can be certain that those who move down the UC path are unlikely to look back.
