Obviously everyone is aware that the Olympics have been going on, if not, you must be disconnected from just about every form of human communications available today. Whilst all this was going on in China, thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet, I could still get live feeds via the web of the events, and could watch events on demand via digital TV (thanks BBC – great service!)

As someone who is old enough to remember the landing on the moon, and who was brought up on the original Star Trek series (still the best IMHO), it occurred to me just how far we have come in the past few decades technologically.

Whilst we haven’t managed inter-planetary communications devices (primarily due to lack of demand), the mobile phone is an obvious example of technology that has changed the way we communicate. Equally the web, email, broadband (including the mobile variety), instant messaging etc are all changing how we interact with one another. That said, paper has not disappeared as a form of communication, it is still going strong and has its own supporting technologies such as scanning, document management etc.

As we strive to pack more into our day, we have become increasingly time-poor, and rely on this variety of technologies to communicate with the rest of the world from a location and at a time that suits us (i.e. when we have 5 minutes spare!).

I note the interest in unified messaging that now seems to be growing; however I think that the critical issue that has been overlooked is the contextualisation of these communications. Organisations are being offered all sorts of technology solutions to unify the disparate communications they receive via multiple channels from time-poor, hard-working individuals who reach for the most convenient form of communications available to them. I think that the critical challenge is to unify these communications in a business context, rather than a technical context in order to deliver the services that organisations wish to offer their external stake-holders.

So how can you “join up the dots”? Communications occur to achieve an objective, thus exist in the context of a wider process, whether it is to initiate a process, progress a process, conclude a process or just monitor the performance of a process. Unless communications can be linked into their relevant business process(es), in order to accomplish the objective desired by the initiator of the communication, then all we will be doing is managing the technology rather than managing the business!

Thus if you are considering a unified messaging strategy, without looking at how you are going to derive business benefit from it, and make it work for the benefit of all of the stake-holders, internal and external – then you have failed before you have begun. Organisations setting out on this journey need to consider adopting a business process management strategy, to make their unified messaging strategy deliver on its true potential to unify and streamline their business processes both internally and externally irrespective of the channel of interaction used.

About the author: Paul O’Neill is Delivery Manager for Singularity’s Government unit.

Tags: BPM, Business-Process, Communication, Process, Technology, Unified-Messaging

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under BPM, Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.