Do you yearn for less complexity? When asked, can you explain in basic terms? Wouldn't we all be better off to heed the wisdom of Thoreau and "Simplify?"
Google the phrase "First Rule of Marketing" and you'll find no shortage of opinions. Results will include the importance of brand; the clarity of message; the significance of customer service; "focus, focus, focus;" and many other suggestions. Marketing Week writes that the first rule of marketing "is to segment your customer base and tailor your offering to them."
A common and seemingly self-evident theme is that the customer needs to understand what you are trying to sell them. As pedestrian a concept as this may seem, amid the offerings of our industry I find many categories that confound. It may be fun in the next few paragraphs to pick on Unified Communications.
A simple, straightforward message is illusive. Given all the energies we industry types spend trying to explain the meaning of the term to people, a more important question becomes: Does the term Unified Communications really mean anything? Especially to actual users and buyers, does the term hold a semblance of relevance? Few of us can answer "yes" with earnest confidence.
Rather than simple sentences, our industry seems to strive for complexity. As if we are scientists, we accumulate components into categories. Not unlike botanists cataloguing so many flora and fauna into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, we constantly expand our canon. Google the term "Unified Communications" and you get more than 23 million responses. This number grows daily, and we obsess over these somewhat subjective classifications.
As if we are biologists discovering previously unknown life forms, we also constantly generate new species of UC. I just learned about one of the latest evolutionary steps: "UCoIP." I viewed a YouTube video that taught me this stands for, Unified Communications over IP. If that isn't an enigma wrapped inside a puzzle, I don't know what is.
We publish wikis, multimedia presentations, magazines, Web pages and all manner of digital and print documentation. Yet, we continue to struggle to extract clarity. We come across to the uninitiated as whispering an amorphous murmur. Don't agree? Here's a test: How many blank stares have you encountered when answering the question, "What do you do?"
For us industry insiders, Contact Center, Convergence, Unified Messaging, Video, VoIP and other groupings become like our 50 Yard Line, Center Ice and Home Plate. We align ourselves against those categories, we toe the line, touch mitts and faceoff. We dedicate enormous energies to convince one another that often abstract ingredients coalesce into coherent concoctions.
At times there are revelations. Recently I've begun to learn that there may be a distinction between using Unified Communications and collaborating. If accused of collaboration in an earlier era and lexigraphy, one would have landed in a lot of hot water. Now the word carries a cachet. Collaboration as an activity has somehow taken on a more virtuous connotation than simply communicating in a unified way.
I'm really not sure where the demarcation exists between the two acts. (Or maybe they are behaviors?) I sense that at some point in my communications journey I may cease to be engaged in Unified Communications as I morph into collaboration. Or maybe I pass through phases. Perhaps collaboration is yet another transition--not unlike adolescence--that will yield to some later maturity. Am I on a mystical journey toward some new communications enlightenment? Maybe a mantra is required.
Perhaps Unified Communications and collaboration exist along a spectrum...or do I engage in a completely different activity when I choose one or the other? Maybe these are more like separate phenomena? Maybe they are like the states of a quantum particle, existing both on and off simultaneously? Perhaps we live in a communications multiverse where what you are doing at any instant depends upon who is looking and from what vantage and speed they are viewing? So many questions.
Given that this topic has provided me with an excuse to consume the past few minutes of your attention, perhaps I should be grateful. After all I have chosen a career in the "explanation industry." Confusion only works to my commercial advantage. Maybe I should just close my mouth and not bite one of the hands that feeds me. I can't help myself; I yearn for simplicity. I have a feeling I'm not alone.
