B> In the modern business environment, where we find ourselves communicating and messaging anytime and anywhere, the volume of information users are expected to deal with is growing at a disconcerting pace.
Sean Owen-Jones, managing Director for Lucent Technologies Business Communication Systems (BCS) in southern Africa, looks at how the convergence of communications technologies can relieve information overload.
We`ve come a long way from the security of the constraints of two decades ago, when our communications were defined by good old snail mail, a telephone on a desk, and a secretary armed with message slips. In those days, turnaround times of days, and even weeks, were perfectly acceptable when communicating with customers and clients.
With the arrival in the eighties of voice mail and fax, business users saw a considerable increase in telephone traffic, and correspondingly higher expectations for reactivity. When PCs and e-mail arrived on the desktop, messages became the user`s own responsibility. Somewhat paradoxically, while the volume of communication increased, the "buffer" of the secretary who could filter calls, interpret messages and handle many of them capably, was removed from the process. The explosive growth of the Internet has even further widened our circle of contacts and our reach.
The same technological developments that heralded the arrival of the information age are now threatening to bring us the age of information overload. This is true not only for individual end-users, but by extension, for entire organisations as well.
Communication technologies are converging. Voice and data are increasingly being carried on the same networks, while computer and telephone applications merge through Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). The convergence of such technologies can - if deployed correctly - deal to a large extent with the menace of information overload.
Although industry players are pushing convergence as they battle for new markets, the ultimate beneficiary - should benefits indeed arise - must surely be the end-user. Convergent technologies must be harnessed to make our lives easier.
How can this be achieved effectively, though?
CTI has already provided great productivity gains in the call centre sector, as competitive forces have directed marketing investment into customer-facing systems. Consumers and clients are becoming more and more demanding, often requiring instant feedback to specific information.
Customer-facing systems are a priority, and will continue to be crucial to the survival of any company. Call centre type activities are pervading different parts of the enterprise, becoming more informal and dealing with unstructured requests.
However, as we pander to the clients, are we not sometimes forgetting our own internal users who remain deluged with information and bombarded with communication of all types? Users have to deal with both internal and external communication - often while spending much time out of the office and on the road.
While convergent technologies have been easily financially justified for call centres (which will continue to be a strong market for CTI products and services), convergence solutions also have a lot to offer the business user.
In the near future, CTI will also be used extensively on the normal business desktop, becoming part of the general office environment through incorporation into personal productivity tools and business applications such as sales force automation tools.
This process will bring many benefits. The ability to unify different types of messaging - such as telephone, fax, voice mail, and e-mail - and using technology to intelligently sort, filter and even action messages are good examples of convergence solutions that can help us address the message overload phenomenon.
Furthermore, as organisations strive for more efficient, flatter structures, strategic emphasis is shifting from dealing with information to acquiring knowledge - the "learning organisation". Convergent technology can help us create knowledge by providing the right information at the right time.
Convergence solutions should be used to "bring the secretary back" into business communication tools. This can only happen if the technologies are mobile, easy to use, intuitive and efficient. This may be a tall order, but at the end of the day, it`s the business user who determines the real value of convergence technologies promoted by so many IT vendors.
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