Here's my prediction for the new buzzword you'll hear at Enterprise Connect Orlando 2014: Context.
In connection with communications, context is an idea that's been around for several years: Avaya started talking about it a few years ago, but the concept really got a boost a couple of weeks ago, when Gurdeep Singh Pall talked up its potential during his Lync Conference keynote.
In a way, the idea of context is just the next step in the continual evolution of intelligence in the communications environment. The original telephones were the ultimate dumb device/smart network pair: Just a speaker and a microphone, connected to the smartest of all platforms: A human being, with their unmatched ability to draw conclusions, understand tone of voice, and so on. When Sheriff Taylor asks Sarah to connect him with Miss Crump, Sarah doesn't just know which plug on the switchboard is Miss Crump's extension--she knows that Sheriff Taylor is dating Miss Crump, who's also Opie's teacher. Since she's the repository of all the town's gossip, she probably has a fair idea of why Andy wants to talk to Miss Crump this particular time.
That's why context tends to freak people out. When it comes right down to it, who really wants to live in a town where everybody knows your business? And your "town" today is the world.
Big Data, and the people who own it and can bring analytics to bear on it, know a lot about you, and this could be a boon for business even as it seems bad for our personal lives. In his most recent post on No Jitter, Brian Riggs describes a communications application that uses analytics to prompt the user about what phrases or words they should or shouldn't use when communicating with a particular person in the database. As Brian points out, this could be very useful for business people in all sorts of ways: If you're a salesperson, the system could tell you which words or phrases seem to resonate with a particular customer, even if you're new to the account. If you're dealing with Brian, apparently you want to avoid the mention of Niagara Falls, and of course if you're a small businessman who runs a hotel in an English coastal town, the app could let you know about the sensitivities of a particular set of guests who are staying with you.
The bottom line is, communications is, by definition, about people interacting with other people, and in any such interaction, you naturally want to know as much as you can about the other person. At minimum, you have to know how to find them. You want to know if they're busy right now. You'd like to know if they've read the thing you sent them.
Those are objective "facts" about a communications situation; then there are the preferences, which tend to affect which media get chosen: You want to see the other person's face when you tell them what you have to say to them--faces plus voices communicate more than just voices, which communicate more than text on a screen. So you choose video. Or, you want to conceal that information (or it just isn't important to you): So you reject video.
Obviously, this whole issue can become creepy and scary, and it probably will in some instances that will garner a lot of publicity. Everyone will have to rely on the discretion of the gatekeepers of the information, which is cold comfort. But I think it's probably inevitable. And it may be possible to use it for legitimate purposes in business.
As I say, this idea of context is still a glimmer in the eye of folks like Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, and others. As best I can tell, there's not a product you can buy today that will give you the advanced capabilities that I've been speculating about here. It's a futures type of thing. But I think it is coming.
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