"Too Much Information" a UC Opportunity

One of the most important skills executives need today is the know-how to manage and harness their personal information flow, says Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital.

By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41 percent of our time managing email, he notes. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed, he notes.

That's an issue and an opportunity for providers of various unified communications services and applications. Human attention is finite; it doesn’t scale. So in a way, making it possible to receive any message, at any time, on any device, is going to make the information deluge worse, not better.

So the idea of protecting users from communications access is something of an unexplored territory. The notion is that the ability to protect users from getting messages might be more important than allowing them to get all messages, anytime, anywhere. Filtering, call screening and other limitation techniques are, in that sense, as important as accessibility.

Spam filters are somewhat helpful, though less so than one would hope if a user works in any business where messages from people one has not communicated with before are a daily reality. In some cases in can help to prioritize messages from people one has initiated communications with, or communicates with frequently. In other cases, where useful and important messages can arrive without benefit of "permission" tagging, filtering is a problem.

Unified communications, as helpful as it can be, carries with it the other problem of "overload." Someday, that's going to create new opportunities for application providers that can help with "pay attention to this" mechanisms.