Second-Generation IP Promises New Levels of Individual and Enterprise Productivity

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Nov 2004 by Davis, Becky

We all do it: Call people to alert them to important e-mails. And if we don't reach them directly, we'll leave a voice mail. And should the e-mail be especially urgent, we might next try contacting them by other means; on their mobile phone, by calling a colleague or associate, or perhaps by instant message or short message service - anything to ensure they retrieve the e-mail.

This phenomenon, related to another productivity-sapping but regularly occurring business activity known as phone tag, seems pedestrian enough. Yet implicit in it are several critical aspects about the nature of the sender and recipient's working relationship and the mutual business between them:

That the e-mail is time-sensitive enough to require an alert in the first place and would be best handled in real-time or near real-time;

That the sender has no idea about the status of the recipient, such as if the person is available at all, if the person has ready email access or even if the person will be checking their voice mail in time to receive the message;

That the latency inherent in this situation is an unknown variable both in its duration and in its potential impact on a positive outcome of the business matter at hand.

Whatever we call this sort of communication to get someone's attention (phone flag?); it's bound to get worse as the business world unties itself from the traditional office. By 2006 nearly 60 percent of workers will operate outside traditional offices, either traveling on business, teleworking, or in mobile situations such as visiting customers or making service calls.

With more and more workers employed apart from each other, business faces other potential productivity drains as well. Workers may also be separated from company information resources, including corporate applications, databases and the knowledge and skills of co-workers. And they'll still suffer from the rising flood of irrelevant information, the disjointed and poorly synchronized tools for communications and information access, and the usability challenges from having to engage a variety of interfaces across multiple devices and multiple communication channels.

How bad can it get? By some estimates, information workers are managing more than 60 times the information they would have 30 years ago. And they use an average of 10 devices to communicate in their work. We have to wonder about humans' limits to cope with it all, much less manage it productively.

In many ways, the technologies designed to help manage these mobility, connectivity and information management challenges have only made matters worse. Consider a colleague who juggles three jobs and, between work and home, manages three wireline phones, two cell phones, five voice mail accounts, a desktop PC, two laptops, and four e-mail accounts. Small wonder that the PDA he bought back in 1998 still sits in a drawer unused because he never had the time to sort out how to put it to use.

Clearly today's world suffers from a fragmented communications landscape. The legacy phone system, both public and private networks, evolved to meet the needs of real-time, synchronous voice communications. Then voice mail debuted, enabling asynchronous voice communications. Concurrent with that development was the rise of corporate and public data networks, eventually leading to e-mail, bulletin boards, the Web, chat and instant messaging. Next came wireless networks that today can carry both voice and data. And although technologies like unified messaging have helped join the content of these disparate networks, the fact is that the networks remain distinct and require considerable management of communication and information flows across them.

Fragmentation Results

This fragmentation has real-world consequences. It's been estimated that as much as 65 percent of the our GDP is now related to the transacting of business rather than the goods and services that business provides, up from 50 percent in 1970 which was up from 25 percent 1OO years before.

Of course, the rising proportion of transaction-related GDP inputs could be attributed to the lower costs of producing goods and services thanks to new technologies, more efficient processes, economies of scale, and the outsourcing of manufacturing (and now services) to least-cost producers.

But a compelling case also can be made that the GDP's transactional components - largely interactions between humans and between humans and information - have not benefited from productivity enhancements to the extent that the production and delivery of goods and services have. (Surprising as it might seem, many businesses still operate using paper and fax ordering and fulfillment systems that then require error-prone key entry.)

This suggests, then, that a huge opportunity exists to derive value out of the transactional side of business by radically reducing the latencies and cycles inherent in today's communications, information access and associated workflows. The lingua franca for this? Internet Protocol or IP. The goal? What Gartner Research calls the "real-time enterprise" - a software infrastructure enabling any-to-any, zero-latency information exchange between business applications and the enterprise's managers, employees, partners and clients.