I co-moderated an Interop session yesterday with Steve Wylie, my TechWeb colleague who runs our company's Enterprise 2.0 event; the focus of the session was, not surprisingly, on the nexus of UC and E2. Coincidentally, Phil Edholm, Nortel's CTO and VP of network architecture, had kind of teed up this topic in the session that preceded our E2 session.That previous session, which was moderated by Don Van Doren of UniComm Consulting and Vanguard Communications, focused on the New Competitive Landscape in UC. Towards the end of that session, Phil commented that, today, communications are "events," with discrete beginnings and ends and pretty much purpose-driven. Phil asserted that communications will evolve to being "socially based," with social software tools allowing for greater opportunity for ad hoc interactions that lead to moments of serendipity that further true collaboration.
In our UC-E2 session, Mike Bergelson of Cisco (a recent addition to our blogger roster here at No Jitter) predicted that folding social software tools (your Twitter-like, wiki-like things) into communications systems will generate the kind of "hyperproductivity" that characterizes startups, where collaboration is close and intense because people have ready access to one another for brief, focused bursts of collaboration.
At the same time, Mike tossed a bit of cold water onto the tendency of E2 proponents--as happens with every hot new technology--to suggest that their pet technology is going to displace the "old" way of doing things. The notion, for example, that Twitter and its kin will replace email is absurd, and Mike advised the E2 backers in the audience not to sell their solutions against email; he pointed out that email didn't gain success by being positioned as a voice mail replacement--even though among some users, it has become essentially that. Instead, Mike said, social software should be presented as solving specific use cases.
We didn't spend a lot of time on the things that tend to worry enterprise communications managers today about social software--security, governance, policy. Those are critical issues that we'll delve into more at VoiceCon and here on No Jitter, because social software--whether it's employees' ad hoc use of Twitter or the continued integration of communications with platforms like Microsoft SharePoint--is going to be a part of how end users work together, and enterprise communications managers will have to deal with this phenomenon.
