I recently downloaded and have been reading the last book from Kevin Kelly, one of the original Co-Founders of Wired Magazine where he was the Senior Maverick/Executive Editor until 1999. Kevin is the author of What Technology Wants (Amazon link). I actually first heard about the book during a podcast interview with Kevin on RadioLab. Great interview if you have a change to download it.
In the book, Kevin introduces a brand-new view of technology. He suggests that technology as a whole is not just a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin coins on of the coolest phrases for this living blob, that is right out of Star Trek – the technium.
Kevin looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course, and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed.
This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.
With this frame of reference, I thought it would be interesting to speculate as to “What Unified Communications wants.” After all, it is a nice bounded arena of technology – the unification of communications and collaboration into a pervasive, but user controllable situation. Yet, even within this definition there are limitless directions that UC can take.
So, what does UC want? Here is a short list of items that I see in the UC technium
1. UC wants to be IP Based – this is somewhat of a fizzle of a start to this list, but a near term tipping point is about to happen where communications will be primarily via TCP/IP protocols. Think beyond email, presence, and so forth. Think about ALL voice communications, all video – and more importantly all the networking that will connect them.
2. UC wants to provide for us a “meaningful signal” – no one needs to be convinced that we are flooding ourselves with information. And the promise of pervasive communications has the double edged effect of adding further to this problem. But unified communications, true UC, wants to helps us sort through this clutter. It wants to be a beacon of “clarity” that is increasingly valuable but hard to discern. Unfortunately, I fear that information overload will appear to get worse before it gets better.
3. UC wants to make the idea of collaboration as “mission critical” – Think of what clear information could bring to your personal life or your business. Business continuity, faster decision making, broader innovation, all leading to competitive advantages. In the beginning of this transition, high performance workplaces will lead their markets because they make better use of their resources.
This is only a start to this conversation. What do you think? Please let me know if you have other concepts you believe is part of what UC wants…
