My first job after graduating from college was at Gnostic Concepts, one of the leading market research and consulting firms at the time. The company's 70 or so employees made it one of the larger and most successful consulting firms of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (There is a company of the same name operating today, but with no relationship to the old one which folded in 1986.)

Gnostic Concepts merged its communications and computer practices in 1984 in advance of what it perceived to be the joining of both fields into a unified communications/messaging paradigm. While that was a wise move in many ways, the only problem is that they were about 20 years too early. Our own research, just published in a study of the unified messaging market, shows that only about one in 10 corporate e-mail users in North America actually uses a truly unified system today.

There are a number of factors that have held back the unification of communications. For example, our study found that about one-half of midsized and large organizations anticipate that there would be moderate to significant “political” difficulty between the groups that manage e-mail and telephony – deciding who would take the lead and who would be folded into who is not a trivial issue in many firms. 

Another issue is that many of the benefits of unified communications and unified messaging have not been spelled out with sufficient clarity. For example, while unified systems make users and IT more productive and more efficient, just how much more productive and efficient will they actually be? Many organizations, in the absence of hard evidence about the advantages of unified systems, simply won’t pony up for the investment.

The unification of computers and communication into the unified communication systems of today has been a long time coming, but it is finally happening, albeit much more slowly than many had believed (Compare Unified Communications products).

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.