Personal view: Only connect to extract the content from the chatter

How much time do you have to read this article? A five-second scan? Or the five-minute read it requires?

If you take the five-minute option, how many interruptions will divert your attention during that time? What is going to ring, beep, flash, vibrate or play the skinny version of the Hallelujah Chorus?

The onslaught of new technology in the corporate world creates a constant electronic chatter with information coming at us in unprecedented volumes from an ever-increasing number of sources and devices.

At lot of it we “hear” but do not have time to “listen to”. Vital information can be lost and trivial information seem important.

Technology has left us all with a chronic case of attention deficit disorder and we are all hard-pressed to find the time and peace for an uninterrupted read of even a newspaper.

The challenge in the corporate world – and especially for companies such as Nortel which purvey technology – is to turn this problem into its own solution. We need to get on top of our electronic information and to do that we need to master the technology.

The average mid-level manager in a business faces a barrage of information: e-mails, voicemails, phone calls, video messages, instant messages, requests for meetings. Each must be accessed individually using processes, system protocols and passwords that are markedly disparate. From this jumble, employees must learn to control and master the information – moving from simply “managing” it, to using the communications tools at their disposal for competitive advantage.

So just how “connected” have we become?

Sage Research reports that the average organisation employs about six types of communication devices and five types of communications applications. With all this technology, you might think people are connecting as never before.

But the reverse is true.

According to Sage, more than half of us try multiple ways of reaching increasingly mobile individuals on a daily basis and 36 per cent of those efforts fail to connect on the first attempt.

In a business context, extrapolated on a monthly basis, that means deadlines are missed or projects delayed almost 25 per cent of the time. That is a huge negative productivity impact from devices and applications that are assumed to deliver productivity, not impede it.

And the bad news? It is going to get worse.

We are entering the Age of Hyperconnectivity – an era when every computing device that might benefit from being connected to the network will be connected.

This means billions of devices communicating with each other and with human users. Information chatter is going to grow louder and so are the complexity and the confusion.

So how should workers of the 21st century address these challenges? How do we cope with this growing storm of information?

We must harness emerging intelligent technologies such as Unified Communications and Service Oriented Architecture. Imagine what is possible when communications functions – including voice, conferencing, caller identity, presence (knowing if the person you are calling is available) and location (knowing where the person you are calling is) – are integrated into a company’s business applications and workflow processes, whether that be billing, inventory, order management, or e-mail.

Presence functionality saves the average worker 32 minutes a day because they are able to reach colleagues at the first attempt. Unified messaging – managing voicemails, e-mails and faxes via a single device – saves the average worker 43 minutes a day.

Imagine yourself as a project manager reviewing financial numbers on a spreadsheet. If the spreadsheet is communications-enabled, what will happen is this: by rolling your cursor over each data entry, a window will appear that identifies who provided the information and how that individual can best be reached at that moment (via desk phone, mobile phone, e-mail, or instant message, for example) and whether or not they are available and willing to talk.

If so, then – on a first-try basis – you will be able to connect directly to them at the click of a mouse while you are still in the spreadsheet. No need to look up phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or try a number of different devices and/or locations. And the same capability could be used when you need to talk to customers, partners, or suppliers

While the outcome is simple, the underlying technology is not. We need to overcome challenges related to interoperability; we need to rethink business processes down to their foundations. But what an impact it could have.

This type of integration facilitates a huge increase in the speed and automation of processes, as the right information is delivered to the right people at the right time – in minimal time – for faster and better decision-making.

Using technology to tame and discipline other technology and build a stronger and more productive enterprise – that is the opportunity before us. And for those companies that succeed, the process will be truly transformative – because these days it can be hard to find just five seconds of peace, let alone the past five minutes.

Mike Zafirovski is Nortel’s president and chief executive