The Communication Revolution - What Unified Communications Can Do - Part 1

This is the next of series of posts related to the communication revolution going on today and the deep impacts it's having on our communication needs and behaviors. This communication revolution impacts both professional enterprise and individual communications.  The previous posts discussed information overload, changes in our social interaction behaviors and the place for social networking in the enterprise.

Communication devices and applications need to adapt to help us manage and leverage this communication revolution.  This post focuses on how Unified Communications can and needs to do to help us manage information overload.  I often refer to it as communication overload.   Unified Communications is not just about the Enterprise.

What is communication overload?
To recap briefly, communication overload is flood of emails, vmails, calls, IMs, disparate networks and modes of communication and information coming at us daily.  The overload is the inability or inefficiency in seeing what's most important in a timely way.   I prefer "communication" rather than "information" overload as a more accurate way to describe the situation.  How do we see and get to what's most important first?  How can we avoid missing information we could have used?  How do we manage all the modes we can be contacted with and likewise contact others?

What are some things Unified Communications and Devices Can Do?
1) Alerts:  Fundamentally, no matter what the source, we need to do more than just filter the incoming communications and information.  Alert and draw me to information and communications that my rules say interest me the most.
Imagine:

• A screen pop alert on my device to tell me that there is a voice mail or email message that is from someone, and/or about something I have prioritized.  The pop should show who it's from and the reason (keywords found via voice to text scan) for the alert.  Rather than the message sitting there dormant in a priority order list, I know there is something there that I need to hear.   In short, I want to be proactively made aware of important communications waiting for me.  Showing a prioritized list when I get around to looking isn't good enough today.

2) Day at a glance dashboard.

• An overall communication dashboard that includes a glance of my meetings, and summary of "communications" or feeds I have - especially the ones that are alerted from my filters.
• Over and above vocie and email filters, provide a filtered and summarized view of social network and blog feeds by source and/or keyword.  In the case of Twitter for example, mark and archive the ones that passed the filter.  Otherwise they will soon stream by unread unless specifically containing my twitter name.

3) Avoiding interruptions - from voice calls, IM as well as the pop-up alerts mentioned above.  These interruptions have both social behavior and disruption of thought impacts.  Presence can be enhanced and used along with filtering rules.

• Use Presence to automatically indicate if you are in any of the following modes:
• Do Not Disturb - not in a meeting but don't want to be disturbed by any ringing voice call, IM, screen pop alerts etc. UNLESS it's from a source or concerns keywords I allow to pass.  For example, detecting a voice mail from home with keyword emergency in it.  I'd want that screen pop alert to come through always.  This could be equated to the busy state in some calendars.  You are not in a meeting, not free either, and are holding this time for work or thought time.
• Not Alone - using video or RFID technology one could potentially automatically detect presence in the office but that you are not alone.  Setting presence manually just doesn't cut it.  This can be used as an automatic, impromptu temporary setting similar to do not disturb above.  It helps with the social impacts of communications interrupting face to face conversations.  This can also be used to suppress screen-pop alerts.  It's also useful for privacy reasons.  For example, it may not be appropriate for a 3rd party to know you've got a voice mail from the M&A manager of Company XYZ.
• Meeting - pulled from your calendar assuming we can clearly identify meeting as opposed to busy as a state.   This is a different kind of busy state.  This presence state is likely to feed into a rule to automatically send voice calls to voice mail, as well as suppress other normal communication or data feed alerts to your communication and/or data device.  In short, improve focus on the meeting at hand.  Reduce the temptation to look at your laptop, smartphone or to answer a call.  Unless it passes your filters, you won't even know you're getting a call until the meeting is over and the meeting state of presence changes.
• Out of office - a state to change the routing of your communication away from your desk devices to your mobile devices.  There are already call forwarding and other communication clients that link your smartphone into your enterprise system.  I'm referring to extending this routing to the other alerting communications/filters described above.
• Personal - with the blur between work and personal we face today, a state like this may be useful.  It can be as simple as time of day driven (e.g. turn to persoanl between 630pm and 7am) or more complex.  This state can be treated differently than the others for allowing or supressing certain kinds of contact attempts or information feeds.  For example, I may suppress just about any information, voice, email alerts, social network feeds that are work related.  However, I may allow calls, tweets or Facebook notifications from personal friends.
• Combine the states - last, why not combine the states for use in the rules engine?  For example, "personal", with "do not disturb" added can be very useful when you are out to dinner with family or friends.  Suppress that urge to pay attention to texting and/or social network feeds rather than our friends in front of us!

4) More Communication Context In Real Time

When I am being contacted by someone, or am about to contact someone, give me more history and context around that person.

• History of last few contacts (voice, email, social net)
• Related documents, emails that may be important to the "conversation"
• Pop the above information up like a dashboard as the contact comes in so I don't have to hunt for history, recent emails etc.  The dashboard should include all the usual contact information, picture, expertise or other context around how or why I know them.

What are your communication pain points?  Please comment on usefulness of these as well as let me know about your own!
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Related Posts
The Communications Revolution Part 1 - Information Overload
The Communications Revolution Part 2 - Social Behavior Impacts
The Communications Revolution Part 3 - Social Networking In The Enterprise

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