Real-Time Communications Dashboards give virtual teams presence-awareness
Stumble It!In a previous post, Bioteams are 'always on' - 'presence' technology introduced, I talked about the need for virtual team members to be able to reach their colleagues at any time on whichever device they are 'present'.
This introduced the concept of 'presence-aware' communications where the system knows which device (e.g. mobile, PDA, laptop) a user is on at any time and automatically routes all in-bound communications in that direction without the senders having to worry about it.
In another related post Microsoft Office: What's On Tap I also discussed how Microsoft plan to address 'presence-awareness' by offering contextual collaboration support within the new version of MS-Office.
Melanie Turek, writing for Collaboration Loop May 24, 2005, has penned a nice article on "Real-Time Communication Dashboards" or RTCDs which are the communication applications which exploit presence- awareness.
The article references three of the leading RTCDs - products from Avaya, Nortel and Siemens.
Melanie suggests that whilst the usage of these products is not exactly heavy today ( running around 7%), users plan to significantly up their use to 40% over the next couple of years.
Presence-awareness and RTCDs is definitely a 'must track' field for all virtual teams.
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The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes. In the excellent book, “Why Teams Don’t Work” the authors, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, identify seven key decision-making methods for teams.
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hey Ken,
That link to colloboration loop is good. I love the Siemens openscape product, and the nortel link to MS Live Server is going to be very interesting. The question remains though, how will people manage an "email plus all sorts system" where no one has any history of using presence technology? i.e. you are basically asksing people to change their awareness of what is "on" and "off" in many instances and many different relationships, all in different contexts. Sure this makes sence in a call centre, but can you think of a real life job where anything like this would "make or break" your productivity ! (consider this provocation!)
Regards
Paul Sweeney