4. Division Over Unified Communications
Dick: [On the phone] I'll be at 362-9296 for a while; then I'll be at 648-0024 for about 15 minutes; then I'll be at 752-0420; and then I'll be home, at 621-4598. Yeah, right, George, bye-bye.
Linda: There's a phone booth on the corner. You want me to run downstairs and get the number? You'll be passing it.
— From Play It Again, Sam (1972)
Disagreement over unified communications (UC) will tear our nation apart in 2008.
Workers at small and midsize companies will fall into two camps: Those in favor of unified communications, and those who want it stamped out before it takes hold of the workplace and beyond.
Those in favor of unified communications will likely be the folks who sign the checks and IT managers looking for turnkey solutions to their telecom headaches. They will both cite ROI and ease of management as key reasons to rejoice and adopt UC. No more balky, expensive PBXs, they'll say. No more hassling with network configurations. No more handsets to be programmed. And they'll be right.
But everyone else may come to loathe the technology that enables managers, co-workers, friends, and family members to track them down by cell phone, IM, or e-mail, wherever they may be: in a meeting, on another call, in a parking garage, or blissed out at a Wi-Fi cafe trying to get some work done ... uninterrupted.
The most insidious aspect of UC is the idea of "presence." With UC, mobile devices can be easily programmed to sense when a user is present and, presumably, available. With UC in the picture, just because you're stuck in traffic or in the security line at the airport doesn't mean you have to miss that conference call.
But if you're fighting traffic, or accommodating the TSA personnel, how "present" can you really be on that call? UC will have to be used judiciously. Because when your presence is ubiquitous, you're really nowhere, man.
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