By Sanjay Gupta
Communication is a strange thing. On the one hand, it is serious business: ask the world’s top management gurus, strategic advisers, venture capitalists or other key influencers and they will tell you that the most desirable quality in a CEO is communication.
On the other hand, our attempts to communicate what we want to are often funny, usually chaotic and sometimes bordering on the outrageous.
While content matters the most in any communication, how it is delivered—in terms of speed, tone and medium—has great significance as well.
No wonder enterprises spend gazillions on communication infrastructure and systems, including landlines, mobiles, chat apps, messaging and email, audio and video conferencing systems, etc., etc. To quote but just one mother-of-all-type figure, according to a Gartner estimate, out of the total global tech spend of $3.7 trillion this year, as much as $1.7 trillion is going to be on telecom services alone.
Despite the high telecom spend (ignore the telcos crying low ARPUs for the moment), enterprise execs mope over the lack of communication—and collaboration—among employees, with customers, partners, suppliers and just about anyone.
One technology that vendors have been propagating for some time (but that somehow hasn’t been able to take off in a big way, at least not in India) for taking the pain out of communicating is unified communications (UC).
UC promises to offer an integrated, real-time communication platform to enterprises who have the vision (and the money) to embrace it. By integrating services such as telephony, chat, presence information (think of the green dot in Facebook chat window against names, for instance), video conferencing, email and data sharing, among others, UC can indeed create a seamless communication experience for its users.
Of special significance to why UC will make more sense than ever is the fact that social media and mobile usage are on a steep rise. Rather than discourage their use, enterprises might do better by incorporating these trends in their communication architectures. Among the benefits: enhanced productivity, business agility and seeding of a more collaborative/communicative culture within the organization.
No one is worried about information overload anymore; what matters more is getting your hands on the right piece of information or insight at blazing speeds. The load may only get worse, but context is king as always.
Did I say that communication is a strange thing?
– Sanjay Gupta
Editor, Express Computer