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ICT: Management of Resources

In my prior post I noted that extending presence to systems, machines and other resources (notably transportation) provides the potential to reduce system latency. Given the ability to see a high-level overview with available "resources" shown and their status such as a train or bus being on-time or late, will allow people to make better choices.

Unified Communications focuses on people presence, while Information Communications Technology (ICT) focuses on business processes, convergence and integration. A key role of management is to provide resources, and an ongoing challenge in daily business operations is the logistics of those resources.

In the past, management responsibilities included facing, head on, logistical issues that impact their teams. People responsible for performing work, service delivery and production are often challenged with questions like where are the parts, what is the status and when will something be available.

GPS has aided movement of freight via rail and container shipping but early on, these devices were used to not just show status or location, but the best route from point A to point B. A California company, Trident Systems, Inc., developed some of these GPS solutions for international shipping, and I remember thinking how cool it would be to be able to track where all the Verizon techs are--besides seeing when trucks are hanging at the local convenience store and coffee shops. Providing management for this kind of data in the early 1990s was more than exciting.

But there's an even greater need to develop and integrate ICT into many areas of our lives and business activities. My example of what is the best way, right now, (situationally) to get from lower Manhattan back to Jersey City, is only one example of something that ICT can potentially improve.

This ability obviously requires real-time communications, and reducing latency isn't just about making people more productive, but taking the guesswork out of the equation. . A key disadvantage to every worker (including management) is not knowing the status or presence of resources.

Where IT departments can excel is by taking a methodical approach to identifying and removing the issues that leave staff guessing as to presence and status of resources - and these resources are not just people. Some of these opportunities exist in:

• The Internet – embedding devices as you've heard before: from refrigerators to airplanes, device-to-device, machine-to-machine and people-to-people/machine
• Predictive Analysis - Use of historic and real-time data to predict near-term future behaviors of people, machines, systems
• Intelligent Interfaces - Apple's Siri is an example
• Machine learning - Tools and algorithms to identify patterns and make intelligent decisions

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