Our next VoiceCon webinar (register here) poses a question that has made me think. The Webinar is titled, "Taming the Nomad--How to Accomplish More by Moving Less," and its premise is that the ever-increasing desire for mobility may be tempered by the realities of the current energy situation. In other words, how do you plan for an environment where workers who used to take mobility for granted are now much more conscious of the amount they're spending to drive or fly? And how can communications technology help you deal with this changing reality?
The webinar, which features Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research, proposes to examine the prospects for "giving employees a seamless, adaptive work environment" that could include:
For the last several years at VoiceCon, we've taken it for granted that interest in mobility will continue its strong growth. Most of the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, seems to support this conclusion. And yet, it's equally clear that people are driving less--the U.S. Department of Transportation reported recently that Americans drove 4.7% fewer miles in June 2008 than in June 2007, and used 400 million fewer gallons of gasoline in 1Q08 than they did in 1Q07, a 1.3% percent drop. So people are cutting down on energy use.
The operative word, going forward, may not be mobility, but rather flexibility. And if that's the case, the "productivity"-based arguments for Unified Communications may look less like a nice-to-have, and more like table stakes. Find-me/follow-me becomes a much more important capability; a UC client that looks the same on a hard phone, PC and mobile phone becomes a particularly useful thing to have; and social networking tools offer the possibility for people to collaborate in various channels depending on the type of device and the environment where the person is working at that moment.
However, such a new state of affairs would also mean that the user is accessing multiple networks characterized by varying qualities of service. If your base for everyday work is your house, VPN over broadband can re-create "office quality" pretty consistently. But if a lot more home-based users, scattered around the country, are plugging IP phones into that remote access network, is backhaul to a single VPN node going to give them the quality they need?
If the nearest company HQ is the place to go for a telepresence/video meeting, will there be enough bandwidth there? (Maybe so, if a lot of the workers now telecommute instead of going on site--unless they're all VPN-ing into that site over the same access link, I suppose.)
Then there's wireless. The quality of cellular voice calling is not getting better, and cell phones will continue to grow in importance--because even if people are sometimes less mobile, they'll still want to use, as one of their baseline devices, something that permits mobility when they do need it. I don't see the traditional digital cellular networks improving--but can VOIP over 3G and 4G deliver better quality?
The world is your campus. Good luck.
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