Collaboration is More than "Communications"

Collaboration is much more than communications, as Dave Michels points out. That is an area of fuzziness when we now speak of "unified communications and collaboration."

Communications is supposed to aid and foster collaboration. "Unified" approaches are supposed to help.  Sometimes they do. But not always.

Some of us are unfortunately old enough to remember when new investments in local area networks and related technology were supposed to improve productivity. Then we went for a decade without seeing measurable productivity gains people could agree on.

Then we had a decade when those investments finally seemed to pay off. The point here is that productivity gains sometimes require retraining people, so processes can be redesigned. And that can take a while. More than just a couple of years, as it turns out.

That does not mean IP communications will fail to deliver meaningful productivity gains. It does mean we often overestimate what is possible in the near term. But we also tend to underestimate what is possible longer term.

Somebody recently reminded me that some of us can remember a world before "Carterfone." Others just "heard about it." Of course, the Carterfone decision happened about 42 years ago. The issue then was simply the legal right to attach a modem to the public switched telephone network.

Where we are today began with Carterfone, but has far outstripped what anybody might have believed was possible. One suspects the world will be affected far beyond what anybody now can imagine in another 40 years.

We are likely then to face incredulous looks when people are told how work and play was mediated by networks in 2010. "That's all you could do?" is likely to be their response. Of course, in 2050 we will be about as far from Carterfone as Carterfone was from the invention of the telephone.

We will get further than any of us can now imagine. But we can go a decade or so before any important innovation has time to really change the way people live and work.

And some innovations just never have too much long-lasting impact. ISDN, ATM, and OSI come to mind. Don't worry, in some ways they are just like Carterfone: steps on a long journey.