Getting the instant message across

Information overload and interruptive technologies such as instant messaging are damaging productivity. But it is the implementation, not the product, that is at fault, writes Robin Bloor.

If communication is the lifeblood of business, then why can't we harness that power? Almost weekly now we are told how business is suffering from information overload, that communications are burdening, rather than brightening, our business prospects.

But is this not what we wanted? Was there not a time when we were all excited about the potential of communication technologies?

This month has seen one particularly powerful technology, instant messaging (IM), thrown under the spotlight.

EDS at one point issued a ban on the use of the technology by staff, questioning the logic of having a communication capability that could open the organisation to malicious attacks from hackers. But it lifted the ban when it discovered that it would have a negative impact on working relationships with customers.

Others have suppressed usage, claiming that it is an open invitation for staff to be distracted and abuse their positions by sending personal messages.

While these are valid concerns, IM should not be blamed for shortfalls in its implementation. It is an accessible, cheap, effective and powerful communications tool.

Why noise annoys

The problem with IM - and indeed, many of our communication solutions - is the classic 'signal-noise' problem. The signal is the useful information gleaned through highly valuable interaction, but the technology can cause unnecessary interruption.

When you look at how some of these communication solutions behave - email beeping, IM springing up onto your screen - it seems almost designed to interrupt important work. However, this is a problem with implementation, rather than the product itself.

Computer activity has generally been based around discreet processes and loosely integrated tasks. Computers are not designed to deal with interruptive behaviour, and humans cannot easily cope with simultaneous tasks. We can overcome these problems, however, with good management.

If we schedule processes to allow for interruption at appropriate times, we can easily overcome many of the shortfalls of interruptive communication technology.

We need to tackle the issue from a business perspective. If you were to create a brand new green-field business you would want an infrastructure that provided the means by which the workforce could operate collaboratively, underpinned by a strict flow of work.

They would have to collaborate anyway, so it would be better to provide good enabling technology for that. Collaboration is key to business success.

It is about timely information exchange. It helps in harnessing the wealth of skills and knowledge within an organisation, and provides the ability to deploy it operationally whenever and wherever it is required.

Today's communication tools - whether intranets, email, IM, telephone or conferencing - provide essential capability. But companies have trouble in deploying them effectively, and the technology itself is not always mature.

Good practice

Nevertheless, organisations should be thinking about harnessing these technologies, not abandoning or deferring them. And this can be done, to a certain extent, through sensible practices.

Consider any kind of geographically dispersed activity; a global IT development project, for example. Cost and delays may come into any given activity depending on the outcome of other activities in different places.

Much of this is a matter of people getting the right information at the right time. So you can give them email for non-urgent information exchange, IM for urgent collaboration and web conferencing when a whole team or several teams need to interact.

The deployment and successful use of communication technology comes down to three things: need, urgency and capability. The need is about what information is needed when, and how the information needs to be received; perhaps interactively, perhaps not.

Urgency relates to what the sender of the information has a right to interrupt or the receiver is willing to be interrupted by.

The capability is a matter of what can be sent: text, graphics, sound or video. On top of that is the matter of staff learning to effectively use what is provided.

The private use of such communications facilities is really a matter of management discipline and employee honesty. It is not sensible to be too draconian, but it is not acceptable for casual usage to damage productivity.

Sensible regulation

It is a matter of sensible regulation, and regulation is a lot easier if the use of such technology is properly logged.

The signal-noise problem is not just a communication issue, although it always surfaces in communication. The word 'noise' used to refer to interference of a technological nature (noise on the line), but now it is also used to denote unnecessary information, and our computing environments are awash with it.

Most PC desktops have applications that are never used. Most PC applications have capabilities that are never used. Most websites have distracting and useless information, such as animated banner ads.

When you enter a search in an internet search engine you usually find a mass of duplicated information. The natural noise level of the industry is very high and, to be effective, you need to be able to navigate through it and ignore distractions of every kind.

Instant messaging is a useful interruptive, interactive capability, and it is not going to disappear; in fact, use of it is going to grow. Businesses need it and they need to learn how to exploit it effectively.

Messaging shows bottle

Instant messaging and unified messaging applications will drive the worldwide messaging market from $1.1bn in 2001 to $4.2bn in 2006, according to IDC.

"While 2001 was a disappointing year for some markets, it was packed with innovation for messaging application vendors," said Robert Mahowald, senior research analyst for the Collaborative Computing programme at IDC.

"Mobile access choices, contextual collaboration deployments and the rise of the voice user interface in unified messaging were a few of the ways messaging vendors managed to weather the storm."