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December 02, 2009
Guest Blogger: Christopher Glenn - Business Enters the World of Now
Following is the first of several blogs you’ll see over the next month from Sprint’s “Seamless Enterprise” bloggers. Sprint’s work in converged networks and mobile integration is helping pave the way to the new “Now” world of borderless or “seamless” communications, shattering barriers, changing the way we work, learn and play. The series will explore the reasons fueling the communications revolution, the technologies and ideas behind it, and the challenges and opportunities for global businesses and IT.
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Business Enters the World of Now
By Christopher Glenn
Ask 100 people what they want, and you’ll probably get 100 different answers. Ask them when they want it, and you may only get one answer – NOW! We are increasingly living in a world where even the milliseconds it takes for a web page to load can create stress. Unfortunately, as more and more information is created, speed alone will not satisfy our craving for having things Now – we have to discover new ways to filter information to create our own unique streams of consciousness.
Social media such as Twitter, FaceBook, wikis, and blogs, are just a few examples of how social context (the pre-defined affiliations we have with other people, groups, and organizations) is becoming the most important tool for filtering and organizing the information we receive. Only social context can bring this invisible hand into the information world, replacing the bureaucratic, hierarchical structures that historically have determined who needed access to what information and when.
Just as Communism fell at the end of the last century, centrally-controlled information paradigms like Web 1.0 and email are falling under the sheer volume of information being created. This is why I have been predicting the end of email as we know it. Only when a stream of information is filtered through an infinite number of variables that track your friends, your interests, your demographic, your job rank and role, your clubs and group affiliations, where you are and where you've been, etc., can you make sure that what you need is delivered Now. This kind of contextual filtering can’t happen with today’s centrally-controlled information world, because the stream of information needs to be based on who you are and what you are doing right Now.
More and more people are embracing this “State of Now,” as Jeff Pulver has christened it, as they interact with friends and family. But to come full circle, companies must embrace this social revolution in how they interact with us as customers and between themselves and their employees if they want to thrive. The communications tools to keep everyone connected, virtually anywhere and anytime, are there – in terms of mobile wireless connections powerful enough to handle whatever voice, data, and video streams are being sent. The challenge for companies will be in re-engineering business processes to empower the front-line people in a way that frankly scares corporations to death today.
But the front line is already winning out. Customers now Twitter the latest problems with new smartphone devices within moments of going on sale and the wireless carriers’ customer service agents are monitoring Twitter to collect, organize, and remedy the problems in a fraction of the time it used to take. This saves millions of dollars in lost sales, returned merchandise, and service and repair expenses.
When I started in business, we use to write 10-year plans. Then, we did 5-year, 3-year and now 1-year plans. Strategic planning for companies will never go away, but it is becoming more and more obvious that a company’s ability to respond to things that it did not plan for may well be more important than to execute against those plans it did make.
Converged wireless and wireline communications networks are the foundation for the transformative changes we will see in the next few years in the way people and companies interact. The State of Now demands instant responsiveness, allowing users of social media to seize any and every moment by making sure they can get what they want as soon as they want it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a customer buying a product or service or getting a response to a complaint, or employees sharing sales, marketing, or customer feedback data. Companies must start living in the State of Now, because many of their customers already are.
Christopher Glenn is guest blogging on behalf of Sprint’s Seamless Enterprise blog (seamlessenterprise.com), which focuses on unified communications, convergence and related enterprise issues.
You can follow Christopher on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/NetThink
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Tags: Sprint, social media, Seamless Enterprise, twitter, Christopher Glenn
Posted by jeff on December 2, 2009 01:50 PM | Permalink
Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos