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There is a beautiful Sanskrit couplet (sloka) that says the knowledge that only resides in the book, and the wealth that is with someone else, have no value because they cannot be used when needed. As businesses compete more and more on knowledge, there cannot be a better time to look back at the wisdom of our great seers as they so aptly articulate todays challenges.

Consider this. Organizations today spend a significant part of their capital expenditure (and increasingly operational expenditure) on building world-class IT systems. In India, many of the new generation companies benchmark against the best in their class globally. They go all out to collect information, clean it, process it in all ways possible, and by the time they are able to act on that, it is already outdated!

There was one joke doing the rounds about software a few days back: if it works fine, it is probably outdated. Many now apply the same to information. If the information is part of a structured database, probably it is outdated.

We are not exaggerating. Take a common example. When you want someone to immediately contact you because you want to buy insurance and you send an SMS to a short-code advertised by the insurance provider concerned, there is often no response for a week, or more. But when you are least interested, you get five calls a day asking you to buy an insurance policy!

In the first case, the company lost business because the people who should have been able to access that information as soon as you sent the SMS request had no access till a human intervention put them to the structured database. And by the time that task was completed, you have already got your policy. If someone calls you, you are not interested. In fact, as the growing demand for Do Not Call shows, you are probably irritated. That is loss of goodwill. So the company loses on both fronts.

If only information would have moved smoothly to the person who required it most: the sales guy in the insurance company or an agent!

To paraphrase the teaching of the Sanskrit sloka, the information that remains in a static database has no value because it cannot be used when needed.

This is not a very uncommon problem. But it is just surprising how many enterprises actually take it the way it is: a fundamental problem.

Reducing Human Latency
In the real world scenario, when one needs to contact a colleague, she needs to switch from the application shes working in to an address book and then to a device (like a telephone) or a different application (such as email). Thereafter, she would look up her phone extension and give them a call, only to be directed to their voicemail. After leaving a message, she finds their mobile phone numbers and leaves a second message and next, sends an email. While from the organizations perspective, IT struggles to operate an unwieldy mix of disconnected systems: a PBX system for phone calls, a messaging system for voice mail, a solution for email, a system for instant messaging and more.

Technologically, there is no breakthrough to make them smoothly work with each other. The unified communication/intelligent communication applications available today do that effectively.

"The latency that comes due to delayed human response to business process alerts is well addressed by the communication enabled business processes," says Vivek Porwal, head, Unified Communication Business Unit, Avaya GlobalConnect.

The idea of intelligent communication is to use communication to connect several processes and integrate infrastructure to make business processes more efficient and eliminate "human latency" and help companies raise productivity and respond more rapidly to changing business conditions.

Since this is one of the biggest business challenges facing enterprises, this has become a major driver for smarter enterprises. Smart CIOs are demanding that they have a solution for this from their IT vendors. Not surprisingly, Microsoft, which dominates the office productivity space has taken it seriously and has got into a global alliance with Nortel to jointly offer solutions.

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