My last newsletter related the insightful comments of a reader who discussed the negative impacts of too much communication technology on decision-making. The reader also had suggestions for restricting the use of video and other communication tools during meetings.

I believe that the reader is largely correct. The use of technology in the workplace and in our society in general has had some fairly serious and detrimental effects. For example, television is a great medium for imparting information, but studies have shown that it can seriously shorten one’s attention span. The result is that our discourse on important societal issues gets reduced to a few sound bites, meaning that most people don’t learn very much about these issues – it’s hard to explain all the nuances of a particular position during the eight seconds someone will give you their attention.

So, how does this relate to unified communications and video in the workplace? I believe that both are very important and should be implemented by organizations large and small. (Compare Unified Communications products.) For example, a study that we conducted last week among end users found that the typical user spends an average of 36% of their workday doing something in their e-mail client. By bringing together voicemail, faxes, presence-enabled applications, collaborative capabilities and other tools into a unified experience, users can be much more efficient during the 36% of their day they spend in their e-mail client.

Video is another important capability that organizations should definitely investigate, particularly ones with lots of remote employees. Video can replace a significant proportion of business travel in some organizations, especially for regular meetings on long projects, and they can provide additional context during online meetings.

The bottom line is that unified communications, unified messaging and video technologies are very important and provide key benefits for organizations of all types. However, like any capability, they need to be used, and not used, properly.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.