Unified Communications is a waste of time!

What is the difference between Unified Messaging and Unified Communications, and between email and a phone?

Andy Whiteside, Avanquest Solutions:

If you listen to the hype from a lot of telephony and application manufacturers, they’ll tell you that there is no difference, and they now make no distinction between any form of communication software – it is all ‘unified’.

Our question is “Where on earth did this claptrap, twaddle and just plain rubbish come from?”  Well, our theory is that it came about because Unified Messaging was, and still is, brilliant (bear with me).

Unified Messaging was conceived, built and put into production within a couple of very short years in the nineties.

The companies that built it added value, differentiated and still today manage to make users lives a lot easier and feature rich than plain old voicemail.

A lot of people still ‘don’t get’ that by making voice and fax appear to be the same as email, users automatically know how to make the best use of all those forward and reply features that never got used with voicemail.

Looking at that experience, the real time telecoms industry (old and new entrants) decided that they could do the same thing again, but this time, they weren’t going to let innovative and fast moving companies in on the act – they were going to do it themselves instead.

‘Unified Communications’ would of course have similar benefits – a single interface for multiple real time applications (as they still now mostly stand) would be easier to learn.  Telephones,  video, conferencing and instant messaging were in line to be ‘unified’.

Problems with Instant Messaging as an interface:

1. There wasn’t a common and widely adopted existing interface
2. Instant Messaging, in business, was populated in pockets at best (why was that…lets come back to this)
3. IM doesn’t have the same features as ‘telephones’ – and so the benefit of users already knowing how to use features, would never transpire
4. Consequently, it didn’t make it easier for users to adopt the technology, because all of it was new
5. Then, there is ‘presence’, that prevents adoption.

Problems with Real Time Communications:

• Real time communications companies ‘missed’ that the major benefit of messaging is ‘that it isn’t real time’, (ok, we missed that too, at first)
• Each of us has huge demands on our time, the list of ‘things to do’ keeps on growing
• Our attention is a finite resource, and with all the communicating that goes on, not only with real time communications and messaging, but through new social communications tools like facebook (a self updating address book sounds good) twitter and blogs like this one
• From advertising and cold calls, to the family walking into the home office, the distractions and interruptions make it impossible.

And now with UC, for goodness sake, all of our needy colleagues can see exactly when we’re at our desk, and even if we’re typing a response.

We’ll never get any actual work done!  This new fangled ‘presence’ is good for the interrupter, but not good for the interrupted, it’s just so impolite.  Knowledgeable people and management are all diving for cover.

The plain fact of the matter is that we don’t want or need ‘more’ real time conversations, we need less, more important, ones.

So, traditional communications companies persist in the Unified Communications message, and to our mind this does everyone a disservice. Whether they lack the capacity to work this out, or whether the confusion is intentional, I’ll leave you to decide.

There is a bigger issue, and that is of communications automation.

Wherever you can exclude manual human activity from a business process, it becomes more reliable.  Whenever you can do this, it frees people up to have more important conversations.  For example, with Accounts Payable applications, instead of chasing payment advice, people can be negotiating discounts for early settlement.

The Unified Communications ’name’ covers up these important communications enabled business process technologies, for no good reason!

Don’t call me, send me a text..