* The advantage of unified communications over the disparate forms of communications in use today
There are five primary ways in which we can communicate with others in a business setting: we can send an e-mail; make a phone call; send an instant message; send a fax; or physically visit someone.
Today, we carry out each of these tasks with a separate capability: an e-mail client; a telephone; an IM client; a fax machine or fax software; and our feet. One of the promises of unified communications is that we can ultimately consolidate all of these functions into a single client that integrates presence, telephony, video, audio and other capabilities.
The advantage of unified communications compared to the disparate forms of communications that we use today is that it makes communications more efficient and less expensive. Unified communications also can improve business processes and the speed of decision-making.
However, despite the many advances being made in the area of unified communications, senders are still largely in control. If you want to communicate with someone, you decide if you’ll send an e-mail, an instant message, place a telephone call, etc. However, given that one of the promises of unified communications is that users will become more productive, the ultimate goal of unified communications really needs to be that the recipient is in primary control of the communications experience.
In a recipient-controlled unified communications world, users would have a single point of access, such as an e-mail address instead of the variety of addresses and numbers that we use today. Users would then populate a directory with their preferences of the device on which they want to receive communications based on the time of day, their location, their presence status and other parameters. The advantage for the recipient is that they gain more control of how and when to receive communications. The advantage for the sender is that they can no longer have to concern themselves with how best to communicate with someone.
Clearly, this type of unified communications is a ways off and may be hard to justify for many organizations. I’d like to get your thoughts on this idea: as both a user and a recipient of electronic communications, would this be better than the current system of different communications tools we use today, or would it create more problems than it solves. Please send me an e-mail with your thoughts.
