At Enterprise Connect 2012, one of the session speakers made the following statement: “Presence is not about being productive, it is a way to interrupt.”
The speaker went on to say that the presence icons one sees on a buddy list are of no value because they are not context aware (I can only assume he was referring to his own company's offering as well as the presence indicators from competitors). He went on to introduce a concept called “awareness”, likening it to a personal assistant that prepares everything for a meeting in advance so that when the meeting starts, all of the content supporting a meeting is ready to go.
Discussions about context awareness are not new, and I specifically remember having them with Microsoft and Cisco some years ago. Clearly, context is an important element as one considers the overall communications environment in which people work.
I do take exception, however, to the idea that presence has no value unless there is rich context surrounding it. Clearly, the more context that can be built into an IM/presence engine, the better, assuming the context is accurate. The better presence and IM solutions do aggregate presence in the following ways:
- Computer presence (logged in, tapped on keyboard lately),
- Telephone presence (in a call, not in a call)
- Calendar presence (in a meeting, not in a meeting)
- Mobile phone presence (not all IM/presence engines can do this, but some can)
- Location (some try to determine location automatically; for others, you must set it)
- “What’s Happening” status (a simple message one can type into the buddy list indicating what one is presently involved with)
I would agree with the Enterprise Connect speaker that *undisciplined* use of presence can indeed be a serious interrupter and time waster. I recently wrote a Quark that points to disturbing research that shows that social media and unified communications will cause employee distraction.
However, disciplined use of presence, even if it is just computer presence, can be a godsend. Simple computer presence can almost entirely eliminate internal voice mail. It can also eliminate repeated attempts to contact people through different communications channels. While it seems laughable given the tools available today, there are many people that receive email, desk phone voice mail, and mobile phone voice mail all about the same topic. If there is a speech-to-text mechanism enabled on either the desk phone or the mobile voice mail, then the user gets yet another email message about the same topic.
Stop already! Presence and IM can eliminate most of this communications overload and free people from email and voice mail jail.
Disciplined use of the presence and IM system can be extremely helpful, *if* organizations will establish a few rules of etiquette:
- Update your presence status (or better yet, get a system that does most of the updating automatically). If the presence status is wrong, people won’t trust it and will use other methods to contact one another.
- Don’t sleuth. It is annoying when someone sits on the network watching the presence status of others while not revealing their own. If you don’t want people to bother you, simply log off, and they will know to send you an email – or better yet, change your status to DND (do not disturb), and the person will send you an email.
- Ask before you call. It is a courtesy that is both respectful and time saving. Most often, the person you are trying to contact will respond that they can take the call or tell you when they can take it. It just saves leaving a voice message or completely interrupting someone.
- Keep IM to short transactions. If a conversation goes beyond just a few back and forth text exchanges, it is often faster and more productive to escalate the conversation to a phone call.
These simple courtesies and practices can make presence and IM become capabilities one won’t want to live without. Organizations that faithfully use these guidelines will see significant productivity gains, even from public presence and IM systems, like Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, and Google. They get even more value from more sophisticated enterprise IM/presence solutions like Microsoft Lync, IBM Sametime, Cisco Jabber, Avaya one-X/Flare, and similar systems from other vendors that add context to presence and IM.
As the speaker said, awareness and context are clearly useful, but to state that presence/IM does not enable productivity is clearly in error and ignores the fact that many, many enterprise and consumer users do find it highly valuable. It is undisciplined presence/IM that we need to need to watch out for and correct, augmenting IM/presence with context as possible.
