The late Peter Drucker invented the term‘knowledge worker’ in 1970. With the pervasive growth environment evident across India today, there is an increasing need for an academically capable workforce because the most important role in business (according to Drucker’s predictions) would be “to make knowledge more productive.” Hence, empowering knowledge workers is a key business imperative since this has deep linkages to productivity.

Knowledge workers from India operate in a global environment and frequently travel away from their offices or workgroups, or are located in distributed locations away from peers, subordinates and supervisors. There are also a large number of knowledge workers who telecommute from home. Organizations of all sizes, from the enterprise to the small and medium-sized business (SMB), are spending large amounts on communication devices and applications to keep their knowledge workers connected. But productivity suffers and projects often get delayed when customers are unable to reach these primary players.

Business and technology decision-makers already place a high priority on providing optimized communication between remotely-located knowledge workers and their teams. Indeed, the modern organization is already awash in communication devices. A Sage Research study (Unified Communications Application: Uses and Benefits; January 2006; based on a survey of 200 small, medium and large organizations), revealed that even though more tools should lead to easier co-worker access, if the devices are not properly integrated the net effect can be counterproductive. Hence, in practice, employees must often guess which method (desk phone/cell phone/email) is best for reaching their colleagues at a given time. Their first attempts often fail and 56 percent of organizations report that employees are unable to contact co-workers on the first try at least on a weekly basis. This can lead to real negative economic impact.

India’s broadband subscriber base stands at 2.21 million as in February 2007, and is envisioned to touch 20 million by 2010. According to another study, laptop sales comprise 20 percent of total PC sales in India, and are growing at about 86 percent annually. But the core problem—how to create and sustain an effective communication environment for mobile personnel and distributed workgroups—remains a critical business issue.

Communication challenges
Business communications have become more complex. Despite investments in technology such as instant messaging and mobile devices, companies still have difficulties contacting key decision makers in a timely manner. In order to solve this problem, modern organizations must overcome two major challenges:

• Gain visibility into the availability, schedules, or presence status of primary decision makers and primary players in a timely way.
  
• Improve collaboration—spontaneously, productively, cost-effectively, and on an ongoing basis, regardless of the location or the device being used—to produce tangible results and business benefits.

The failure to address these challenges could have severe repercussions including delay in projects, risk to customer and channel relationships, effects on business process reform and financial performance, and decreased productivity. Moreover, poor communication affects strategic initiatives such as lean or just-in-time manufacturing, supply chain optimization, and customer relationship management. It can have negative results in high-turnover environments that are highly dependent on customer service, or in the perishable goods industry. It can also frustrate the development of next-generation contact center environments that depend on the ability to quickly escalate customer inquiries, route them to the right ‘expert’ across the distributed contact center, and resolve them quickly using the optimum mix of media.

Knowledge workers need ways and means to resolve urgent questions across an entire project lifecycle. Upstream decisions affect future decision-making and even the ultimate viability or relative success of the project itself. With a distributed or mobile workforce, primary players must be accessible and fully enabled to communicate effectively, spontaneously and fully with team members. Research indicates that when issues come up, many workers find it difficult to quickly assemble their team in real-time to discuss a critical problem. Trying to schedule informal or unplanned conference calls often results in delays while waiting for others to respond.

Unified communications
These developments have created a need among businesses, from SMBs to enterprises, for an effective communication system that enables them to streamline business processes; reach the right person the first time; make communication more personal, collaborative and mobile; improve the user experience; and improve profitability. Unified communications is an emerging class of applications and services designed to improve communications within the modern organization to keep workgroups connected, enable them to collaborate effectively, streamline business processes, and provide a competitive advantage.

Today, when the Indian economy is growing rapidly and the number of knowledge workers is steadily rising, unified communications is being viewed as the new paradigm for employee communications that improves the flow of information and allows employees to reach each other rather than an unattended communication device. The Indian telecom market is growing at a rapid pace spearheaded by the mobile industry. This industry is adding more than six million subscribers every month, making India one of the fastest growing markets in the world. In such conditions, a comprehensive IP communications system of voice, video and data, and mobility products and applications, can help organizations communicate more effectively, more securely, and in a more personal way.

Unified communications enables people to find peers or decision-makers using a single telephone number or Internet address. It integrates e-mail, instant messaging, and calendaring applications with communication devices and applications such as telephony (wired, wireless); voice messaging; audio, video and Web conferencing. Unified communication applications support advanced presence-sensitivity and find-me capability, and media independence. They are easy to use, with a familiar intuitive interface linked to powerful functions. They also provide voice access to applications and data. In other words, unified communications provides an easy and improved user experience with advanced desktop functionality allowing the user to point and click to set up collaboration sessions and conference with others (blending audio, Web, and video as needed within the same session). Corporate executives, business managers and others charged with protecting the operational advantages of a business want to strengthen their comparative advantages with unified communications. It has been proven to reduce user frustration and cycle time, and accelerate decisions through an easy-to-use, reliable communication system. By using the network as a platform to enhance advantage by accelerating decision time and reducing transaction time, it enables users in any workspace to connect anywhere, anytime and anyplace using any media, device or operating system.

As the India growth story continues, fueled by the slowdown in the US markets, the appreciation of the rupee against the US dollar, increased strategic outsourcing, and the expansion of large Indian companies beyond India, Indian businesses are demanding ways of simplifying communications for their mobile and distributed workforce and their knowledge workers to improve communication flows, access primary decision makers quickly, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity to positively affect their business.