At some point in my professional life, I was in charge of a strategy regarding Unified Communications in the Enterprise (from XS to XXL). The most obvious aspect to this was the communication angle: obvious to identify, not at all obvious to implement, in particular in view of the various - and pretty heterogeneous - communication channels that were to be integrated (voice, email, contact centers, etc.).

In the meantime, I have discovered another angle that was less obvious to me at the beginning of this work. The real powerful innovation behind Unified Communications was not regarding Communications only but, as importantly, the deeper integration of the various communication channels with their underlying information content, that I termed then Knowledge, though Knowledge can be understood in a larger sense.

By all accounts, there was a need for Architecture to put all the pieces together. To materialize this, I even had produced a Fully Unified Communication and Knowledge architecture which, for some reason, was not retained. To achieve any kind of integration of Communication and Knowledge, an architecture is required and the Web 2.0 should be seen as a first attempt in this direction (departing from the very pragmatic - best interoperability effort - approach of IETF & W3C that produced the Web 1.0).

Considering that Unified Communications is still partly a promise to be fulfiled, I have more than ever the firm belief that the question is still there and that, whatever Web 3.0 will be, it will have to deal with the Communication + Knowledge + Architecture approach. The difficulty is that in the mean time, ICT (the Information and Communication Technologies) has become extremely pervasive and infiltrated a large number of other industries (other than those involved in the "Convergence": IT, Telecommunications, Multimedia). The task is more complex, the promise even larger. This is the space in which CommLedge will operate, as a TPAD company.

Tags: Innovation