IoT comes to the enterprise: An agent of change for better business communications
Here’s what I think we need, says David Gurle of Symphony: Communications platforms designed, from the ground up, to filter and prioritise messages. We don’t need complicated rules engines that will be too hard to configure, or which are too inflexible to adapt to changing signal/noise needs.
We need to make sure that our messaging platforms respond to our employees’ needs, rather than force our employees to adapt to the limitations of their messaging platforms.
My vision is of a system that helps filter the noise, while delivering the signal in ways that are smarter and more relevant to workers – whether via email, mobile phones, apps or the IoT.
The whole point of modern communications platforms is to enhance business efficiency and personal productivity. Most platforms today get that exactly backwards – it’s too easy to add noise, and too hard to effectively filter the signal out of the noise.
Take, for example, the notion of hashtags, which were popularised on Twitter, but which have found their way to other social media platforms. Think about how hashtags can help prioritise internal business messages — such as letting a manager flag all correspondence relating to the #SmithProposal or #DailySalesReport or #RegulatoryAudit — irrespective of whether it’s an email, an instant message, a conference call, an internal or external news feed, or an automated alert from the CRM system.
Business communications can learn more from social media by studying what works. How about @mentions that let you know when you are mentioned in an internal business message, so you know to chime in? Or $messages (also called cashtags) that let you know about specific securities or businesses? How about setting up ad-hoc secure communications groups for projects, where you can prioritise messaging in that group? How about configuring alert preferences – including vibrations and sounds – for specific categories of messages, and being able to alter those based on where you are, what time it is, and what you’re doing?
Most important, how about setting up a user-centric cockpit where each employee can control his or her message preferences, filters and priorities – and where messages from all different streams can be aggregated, searched, shared, and archived.
It’s a big vision, to be sure, but the signal/noise ratio is a big problem. We at Symphony provide our customers features to surface the signal. Too many car photos, not enough critical information on KPIs and workflow. We can change it. Now’s the time, before the IoT turns the fire hose up to an unmanageable scale.
The author of this 2-part blog is David Gurle, CEO of Symphony.
About the Author:
David Gurle chief executive officer Author, inventor and leader, David’s ideas have reportedl influenced the major trends in enterprise communications over the last 15 years. He defined Microsoft’s unified communications strategy (Lync) and as head of collaboration services at Thomson Reuters introduced federated communications to the financial services industry. Before founding Perzo /Symphony, he was VP and GM of Skype’s Enterprise Business.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_ OR @jcIoTnow
