A Point of Contact

For the last few years, we’ve all been excited about the opportunities presented in the unified communications, convergence, and IP telephony realms. There are some really exciting developments in technology that are allowing organizations to maximize functionality while reducing costs. The idea of merging resources and information together and “unifying” the organization’s business processes through technology is very inspiring. In the last few months, I’ve written a few articles on the impending “divergence” of communications, which is obviously the exact opposite of “convergence.” In “Is Convergence Diverging,” we took a look at the creation of separate data silo environments which erect concrete walls between systems instead of removing such barriers. In this article, I would like to take a look at information overflow as a potential threat to the convergence field and business idea. First, conduct a mental analysis of what communications resources you have. Analyze how many “points of contact” you maintain on separate networks or systems. Consider the following examples: – Home phone number – Cellular phone number – Office phone number (sometimes multiple) – Pager – SIP URI, Skype alias, etc. – Home email address – Work email address – Listserv memberships – IM network aliases – Social network site memberships … the list goes on, and on! The idea of unified communications is to merge common resources together. In theory, this is a good principle, but is difficult to implement in practice. These “aliases” exist on multiple networks, located in many locations, and managed by separate and diverse organizations. Through the open source community, we are seeing the development of plugin-style architectures that allow these systems to integrate and share information with one another. At the present time, there is not one “authoritative source” that will manage this laundry list of contacts. Technically, we haven’t developed standards and protocols that vendors can agree on for such a level of integration. This is a big picture statement: Where are we going? Will we continue to create and develop “data silo” environments to further complicate communications? In my honest opinion, the organization or company that can begin to integrate the 10+ methods of contact that most of us possess, will become the most successful. Is it a daunting task? Sure, but it absolutely needs to be done to sustain and further the industry. –