Can you hear me?

Telephone, tele-fax, tell-a-friend... Add cellphones, e-mail, instant messenger, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, IRC and so on and so forth, and you have a million ways to reach someone, who you probably still won't get hold of.

For most of us, the more communications media hit our desks, the more we want to curl up in a ball under said desk and ignore the lot of them. For the companies responsible for paying for all this, things are even more complicated. And life is not going to get any simpler anytime soon.

It's not all bad.

“We're starting to see the technologies and solutions in SA that were generally only available in the EU and US starting to take hold, so you don't necessarily have to be in the office to operate as if you're there. You can be across the sea, at home or at a satellite office and access infrastructure as if you were on the LAN via broadband,” says Hannes van der Merwe, Itec Distribution product manager for Mitel.

“It simplifies what corporates have to have available to a workforce to enable it to work optimally and productively,” he says.

“I think we're seeing a lot more choice of devices and applications that let users pick and choose how they want to be communicated with, and through what device. Ipads, Web cams, IM, e-mail, RSS, video - they all just offer the user a broad spectrum of choice; it's not necessarily overload,” says Gavin Hill, business development manager, unified communications, Dimension Data Middle East & Africa.

“The real benefit comes when the applications are aware of each other and integrated. This enables 'presence' - the system knowing where you are and what your status is, and how willing you are to receive communications, e.g., I want no calls during a meeting but I can take an IM. This allows the recipient to choose how they want to be communicated with and lets the person initiating make more intelligent choices.

“You can offer rich information back to the network and person trying to contact you,” he continues. “We all have e-mail, IM, telephone, fax - these are all identities that point to an individual. If someone wants to communicate with you, they want to communicate with you, not a device, so if we add more modalities of communication, it becomes more important to rationalise identity to something small and simple to remember.

“We no longer remember phone numbers, and seldom remember e-mail addresses, but bringing it down to single identity means I contact that identity and it finds you.”

Most local companies are not quite there yet, although the technology is well established. For many organisations, social media is still evil and to be avoided at all costs, to their detriment.

Says Greg Comline, senior manager at Deloitte Digital: “Overall, social networking does not replace the way companies communicate or do business; it simply provides new opportunities as a result of the extension of the new communication channels. It should be used to make the workplace more efficient.

“Web 2.0 has opened up the Internet to such an extent that businesses no longer have control over what is said about them. Therefore, engaging - even if just listening to the social media channels - has become a business imperative.

“We've introduced a secure version of Twitter called Yammer that we use internally, and we use it to get collaboration going across the business. In some ways we try to eliminate some of the e-mail communication that goes around and look to break down the silos between different business units.”

Ipads, Web cams, IM, e-mail, RSS, video - they all just offer the user a broad spectrum of choice.

Gavin Hill, business development manager of unified communications, Dimension Data

For Deloitte, Yammer has made it possible “for professionals in the firm to collaborate almost instantly, acting as a form of crowd-sourcing that pools ideas to deliver best of breed services to clients,” he says.

“E-mail remains the mainstay of formal communication in the business world,” says Mimecast business development director Grant Hodgkinson, “while short, sharp collaboration 'spurts' are being discussed more and more over sociable media such as unified communications, Twitter or IM services.

“The challenge with many of the social media applications from a corporate point of view would be security (sharing confidential data on a public site). Furthermore, for instant messaging software, it allows only a single thread of conversation at a time, and requires that both participants are simultaneously connected for the medium to have any impact.”

The security angle is always a big worry, particularly in the age of corporate governance. Hodgkinson adds another worry to the pile: “With the ever-increasing pace of communication, the volume of e-mail is only going to increase and at this time, there is no real medium that is as standardised, secure and pervasive as e-mail.

“This means that a greater reliance will be placed on e-mail and thus e-mail is the arena where guerrilla tactics and industrial espionage tactics are most likely to play out in the future.”

And then there's management...

Says Unison MD Craig Young: “In terms of managing your communications, it becomes vitally important to understand work profile and roles.

We've introduced a secure version of Twitter called Yammer that we use internally.

Greg Comline, senior manager, Deloitte Digital

“In the past you could have uniform communications requirements across the organisation and decide on technology across the organisation. Now, organisations are going to have to segment per user or per role, because if someone in a role not needing high network speed has it, you'll probably see reduced productivity, and vice versa. We've seen a few organisations start the process. The challenge that lies with management is also measuring it.

“We're seeing consolidation - applications that are presenting a single point where I can interact with other areas, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn and others. A lot of organisations are challenged in terms of providing measurement in what usage is in different areas and how valid that medium is for that environment in the first place. And if it's not valid, you need to look at productivity, and if you find there is value, how do you measure it? For example, how do you measure if the marketing department effectively uses the bandwidth they do for social media?” he asks.

Some things are easy - implementing video conferencing will reduce both costs and time wasted by people flying around for meetings. An hour on Twitter will be harder to equate, though. And as many have noted, if people aren't wasting time on Facebook, they'll be wasting it on the phone, or at the water cooler, or playing Tetris. So cutting off access may not have any real benefit in terms of productivity, even if it does reduce costs.

It's also likely to totally put off the next generation of employees who consider the Internet to be their workspace. They won't work for employers that don't let them have access to whatever tools they consider essential.