The rise of VoIP has had an immense impact on the traditional desktop.
For a century voice and data were separated systems. Innovations in IT have seen communication and information merge together in ways undreamed of a generation ago.
The telephone remains an integral component of business. But where before it was the one device indispensable to every contingency, the paradigm shifts in digital communication now support a growing variety of platforms.
The integration of voice and data coupled with mobility allow for purely digital work configurations where geographically distributed teams meet and collaborate through digital platforms. For the traditional office, for the time being at least, the PC is the vehicle for VoIP telephony.
But the office phone is experiencing the same evolutionary pressures that produced the mobile devices found everywhere today. The latest desk phone utilizing an open stage device line is web-enabled and incorporates Bluetooth technology. While the desktop phone is becoming more sophisticated, they ways it is used are changing, too.
Communication Is At The Heart Of Business Innovation
More and more businesses are looking for ways to reduce costs. To stay agile, many companies are exploring ways to reduce their real estate footprint. Reorganization of space is making communication the fundamental concern of business management.
Once unthinkable, the physical office is no longer the default in enterprise organization. Modern communication supports new ways to reduce the need for physical office space while simultaneously enhancing and enriching the way colleagues connect and collaborate.
3 Ways Business Communication Is Adapting To Emergent Tech
Hoteling abandons the concept of the deskbound worker entirely. Removing the cubicle and the closed door, workers have access to common areas which foster collaboration. Employees reserve work stations rather than having offices and assigned seating, allowing them to utilize office space to suit their needs.
Each employee has a permanent phone number, which they use to access a digital phone system to reserve a work station. The system then forwards calls to that workstation, where employees answer on a PC. These calls can be forwarded to other work stations or to the worker’s own smartphone.
Adaptability is guaranteed through a variety of workstation options. General purpose stations can be reserved for a work day, or ‘touchdown’ stations can be used for a few hours – something useful for a telecommuting workforce. Finally, walled off stations can be used for workers needing a quiet place to meet a deadline or for confidential communication.
BYOD, or bring-your-own-device is policy option some companies use to increase productivity and lower costs. While using your personal smartphone as your enterprise device has its drawbacks – reliability and manageability can be issues and there are IT headaches with security – it’s a growing trend, one employees increasingly ask for. BYOD allows workers to innovate the way they work while using the tools they prefer.
Mixed Environments. For many businesses, a mixture of work environments is the best means of achieving productivity. In such a scheme some workers have IP enhanced desk phones, others cell phones, still others, UC.
UC users face the biggest communication challenges since they are required to support a variety of applications on a wide array of mobile devices for different user groups. Supporting the social interaction of remote teams has put the person at the center of business management. Before employees were distributed around what suited communication platforms. Now these platforms, more flexible than ever before, are being adapted to suit the needs of the user.
The office phone will probably remain in altered form on desktops for the foreseeable future, but how they are used will change as companies explore new combinations of digital workforces and traditional office workers. The need to unify teams across platforms will be the driving force in business communications, and will see more integration of information and voice systems. At the same time, new ways of communicating will continue to diminish the importance of the traditional desktop business phone.
Sococo has the tools to enable your distributed teams to interact in a more natural, satisfying way. Bringing together multiple platforms from chat to voice to screen sharing in one unified virtual office space, Sococo can support your communication needs in a challenging and fast paced world.
Image by Sebastien Wiertz.
