If you look at the technology used in the consumer space over the past decade, you will see an unmistakeable trend towards software technology adapting to the behaviour of people. Can you imagine a mobile app that came with an instruction manual? Of course not, the concept is alien. Gone are the days a new piece of consumer software comes with a lengthy and complex instructional manual – the cryptic software packages like Lotus Notes of yesteryear are gone for good, replaced by slick intuitive technology.
It used to be that enterprise technology led consumer tech trends, but it is increasingly enterprise that is taking pointers from consumer technology trends. As such, we will increasingly see enterprise software providers follow suit, providing people centric technology solutions. In fact, we are already seeing some of the most traditional business software vendors now placing emphasis on user interface design and user experience. Team Communications and Collaboration technology is no different and is also undergoing the same journey.
Collaboration technology, in particular, will only gain from this shift to people centric technology provisioning. This is because, the lower the barrier to entry;, the more people will engage with a given platform or service. The theory being the more people that use the technology, the more engaged, collaborative and productive your business will be.
But this shift is not happening fast enough in many cases, and consumer technology is finding itself picking up many of the failings of its enterprise counterparts. Mobile apps are an excellent example of this. Employees increasingly use consumer-focused apps on their smart phones to circumvent having to use clunky enterprise technologies that were designed for the same purpose. Couple the failure of enterprise technology to keep up with the ease-of-use consumer technologies offer with the fact that the way we communicate has shifted – towards shorter, crisper messages (over lengthy information-rich communications) – and we can see a nexus of forces at work. Failure of the enterprise to adopt new technologies is driving a schism between the way we work and way we live.
Being able to provide flexibility to use whichever comms channel is correct for your situation is vital in encouraging collaboration. WebRTC is a good step in this direction. It is an incredibly versatile protocol that allows real-time video and other functionality through the browser and apps with no additional installations being necessary. A technology with a low barrier to entry that uses a consumer friendly interface (in this case the browser) is exactly the formula the enterprise needs to be following in order to make collaboration across the business possible.
Unified Communications, as a technology set, must seek to adapt to these standards if it is to fulfil its purpose of enabling collaboration in the enterprise and it must bring these disparate platforms and channels together into single pane of glass– whether it’s consumer or business channel. Before falling back to old patterns, let’s stop talking here, let’s live the new way to work and let’s meet at UCExpo, let’s try it live! Let us bring life to your work with Circuit
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