From Unified To Social Communications And Collaboration

We have come a long way since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. Mr. Bell's first call was to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, speaking these famous first words, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you". Today we can reach virtually anyone on the planet instantly - whenever and wherever they are - with the multitude of communications channels and devices that we have at our disposal. But with this multitude comes the danger of information overload and communications breakdown. In fact, we make a point that the competitive advantages of being an elastic enterprise could be in real danger of being offset through ineffective collaboration between workers, customers, partners and business units caused by information overload and communications breakdown.

In the consumer world, social media hubs like Facebook and Google+ are taking on the role of the personal communicator, social networker, entertainment curator, search engine and directory. Increasingly they are integrating additional communications channels such as voice, mail, and video into their suite of social communications offerings.

In the business world, things are not as clear cut. In fact there are many contenders for the #1 position of what we call the Enterprise social communications and collaboration hub: business software vendors like Salesforce, communications equipment vendors like Cisco, groupware vendors like IBM, social enterprise specialists like Yammer and telecom service providers like BT to name a few.

At the METISfiles we define four stages of communications and collaboration. We believe that within most large enterprises today these four stages co-exist. We also believe that the very co-existence of these stages is causing communications and collaboration headaches for CIOs and for connected workers. Below we will explain what these four stages are and how the communication and collaboration technology stack is changing from vertical, to horizontal and to matrix integration (For more information on computing stacks see our post on computing deployment models and cloud traceability).

Read the rest of this blog post on the website of The METISfiles.