Executive Thought Leadership

Multimode IP Communications

Innovations in electronic communications in the past decade have revolutionized the way business colleagues communicate. The productivity benefits have been enormous-and soon, the payback will get even bigger.

Most of the 1500 business professionals recently surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) about workplace communications indicate that electronic tools such as e-mail and mobile phones have improved their ability to connect "live" with others (82 percent). These professionals also say they are initiating more interactions with the help of communications technologies (78 percent) and that they have become more flexible in their responsiveness to others (92 percent).

With so many different modes of communication available, including the latest Internet, wireless, and messaging technologies, the next critical step is to integrate the separate channels of communication into a cohesive and interactive environment. Soon, disparate text, voice, and video systems will gain awareness of one another, controlled by common directories and network intelligence. And they will run in accordance with each employee preferences, priorities, availability status, and organizational policies.

Presence Management

Intelligent, "presence-enabled" communications systems that help users reach the right people at the right time will offer huge productivity enhancements. Such systems provide access to colleaguesavailability status and let employees know which communications devices are at those users' disposal. In addition, the integrated systems will relieve users from the time-consuming task of having to check multiple mailboxes, manage several phone numbers, and repeatedly self-program contact information into various devices. The effect will be greater than the sum of the parts.

Many respondents of the EIU's Communications in the Workplace survey say they value the immediacy and intimacy of a voice conversation. But they say the frustrating exercise of "telephone tag" often drives them to choose e-mail over voice mail. By contrast, fully unified IP Communications systems, set to emerge in 2005 and 2006, allow much more deterministic and efficient "anytime, anywhere" collaboration, enabling organizations to reach those they need to by phone while drastically reducing missed calls.

Users will shift easily among communications modes-using eyes to read, ears to listen, and fingers to type, depending on the environment and application at handerhaps all in a single session. Such systems will be overlaid with security and priority filtering so that users will not find themselves bombarded by junk e-mail, viruses, and unwanted calls.

Sample Scenarios

Imagine the productivity benefits of the following capabilities:

• Your smartphone e-mail box indicates that you have a voice-mail message and displays a URL where you can listen to it. You click on the URL to listen to the message. You can't respond to the voice message right away, so you forward it to your assistant with a text annotation giving instructions.
• Instead of simply being reminded by your electronic calendar that you have a meeting, you click a "Click to Attend" link when that reminder pops up. A call (voice or video) is initiated, all participants are automatically connected, and the documents to be discussed pop open on each participant's PC.
• An employee contact list, availability status, and priority model are built automatically based on behavior history instead of manual programming. For example, a voice-activated call directory and a "buddy list" for instant messaging might be generated by the 20 most frequently sent messages from the user's e-mail folder. Whether a call should be put through or marked as "urgent" might be determined by the number of calls or e-mails initiated to the incoming caller by the recipient during the past month. Whether a worker is marked on the network as "available" might be determined by whether his or her mobile phone has been switched to "off" or "vibrate".