Business

Over the past two years I have found myself increasingly involved in the movement to use technology to increase organizational agility. This movement had relied on manufacturing technology speed and precision improvements for the past two hundred years with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Recently, this is all changing as cheap access to high-speed internet and communications technologies are enabling true interaction and work product creation in distributed teams. A few weeks ago I participated in a small summit meeting at the Mountain Quest Institute (MQI) in Frost, West Virginia. MQI is a neat place, certainly restful and supportive of deep thinking.

How do you explain the tremendous hype and true excitement about the iPhone? It is not a particularly revolutionary device in that its features all already existed in various places. It's key is integration - simplifying and streamlining the complexity of communications today. People are willing to pay for any device that does this well. Imagine a device you could wear that would serve as an accessory when not needed and morph into a phone, camera or other device form when needed. This sort of device is being developed now in research labs (Here's the video.). This unification of communications as a goal of cell phone providers sets up the broader topic of unified messaging.

Unified messaging is a hot topic right now. It promises integration of telephone, email, and various other ICTs into one interface with unified search, storage, and topic cataloging of content.