While searching for information relating to Gartner’s Unified Communications Magic Quadrant I stumbled across Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008.
1. Green IT
2. Unified Communications
3. Business Process Modelling
4. Metadata Management
5. Virtualization 2.0
6. Mashup & Composite Apps
7. Web Platform & WOA
8. Computing Fabric
9. Real World Web
10. Social Software
At first glance it was not surprising to see Unified Communications (UC) at the top of the list. What it shows is that UC is at the forefront of what organisations are – at the very least – talking about, piloting or adopting within their business environment. What I also thought was interesting were the other technologies highlighted by Gartner which are to some degree either composites to UC – Mashups & Composite Apps. A technology which typically been excluded from UC conversations but is critical to successfully realising and experiencing the UC vision – Metadata Management. Technologies which help reduce a customers TCO and also by default adds to the organisations sustainability and ongoing investment to the environment – Virtualisation and Green IT, and finally a technology which enables organisations to address one of their biggest issues of how to retain the knowledge or intellectual property of our employees before they leave the business – social software.
Of course it must be noted that most of the technologies mentioned above are at very different stages of maturity and many are still in the domain of the consumer and early adopters.
Lets take a look at each in more detail and how they relate to UC.
Mashups & Composite Apps when integrated appropriately can enrich many of the productivity enhancements we have been hearing about. For example converging presence or awareness technology with GSP and Map technologies. Lets say you need to find a suitable contact that has specific knowledge on UC who is available to present on ‘Social Software and the implication for businesses’. Imagine your search result returns 20 suitable contacts across the company and you can view their presence information and current location details within ‘Google Maps’? This would provide you with a visual aid to enhance your UC experience to help you to find the closest resource to fulfil your current need.
Other forms of this technology slowly becoming available to mobile users include location based technologies like ‘Dodgeball’, a location finder app. which you installed on your mobile. This application allows users to search through your contacts stored on the phone to see – who if any – are located within a 10 block radius. Those who respond to your ‘poke’ with be displayed within a map of the local area. Needless to say this technology has emerged from the consumer space and has become a necessity when you’re at your local watering hole and need to locate additional drinking buddies for the big night ahead. The challenge for businesses however is how to leverage this technology for business use…. Where’s the link I hear you say? Imagine being at the airport and your flight is delayed or at your hotel. In this instance you could use this technology to see if any of your business contacts are also waiting for a flight or staying in the same hotel… in which case you can initiate an impromptu meeting.
In many cases when hearing vendors present on UC I hear about the happy-day-scenario where everyone is mobile working anywhere they choose to be using any device… we’ve all heard the pitch, sounds great right? But what gets me is no one talks about the information and data we are trying to access and more specifically how to get that information and data in such a state where we are able to search and more importantly access information anytime, anywhere using any device.
Metadata Management, number four (4) on Gartner’s list of Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008 helps organisations address this by enabling individuals to realise the full benefits of UC by applying the appropriate metadata to each document turning the happy-day-scenario into a reality.
Virtualisation and Green IT number five (5) and one (1) respectively are typically paired hand-in-hand.
Virtualisation makes it possible for businesses to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, increasing the utilisation, flexibility of hardware and more importantly reduces the organisation’s footprint on the environment by using less hardware (server consolidation) and reducing overall power and cooling requirements.
Within a UC environment this topic is becoming a lot more relevant because a typical UC solution will require multiple servers, a DC, Exchange or Domino, Presence, Mobility Servers, Storage Array’s, and many with multiple roles.
Social software which scraps in a number ten (10) will have an enormous effect of the way businesses will communicate in the near future. But what is the number one asset for any business?… it’s people right? So the challenge for businesses is how do we retain good people and if we can’t, how do we retain their knowledge and intellectual property which we can reuse at a later date…? with social software of course.
We can see this technology in action through sites such as mySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, and technologies such as wiki’s and blogs all of which have been driven out of the consumer space by teenagers and Gen ‘Y’s. All of a sudden the World Wide Web has transitioned from purely transactional where information travelled one way to an environment where we can all have an opinion and a forum to express our point of view, whether it be right or wrong.
So the challenge for businesses is how to leverage this technology within the enterprise? We are starting to see this technology emerge from vendors such as IBM with Lotus Connections, a social software server client model which enables individuals to produce their own profile to include past experiences and interest.
One point that we need to remember is that we all come to an organisation with past experiences and interest outside of work which could be useful to the organisation which typically goes unnoticed. For example you maybe heading up a virtual team to discuss a new product development process and you need to find the most appropriate individuals in the organisation to attend.
By searching the organisation’s employee profiles you can find all those who have the knowledge and skill sets you require which are based not only on their current role within the organisation but also their past experiences and interest.
