Impact of Presence Technology
Andy Abramson posted an interesting link regarding the statistics of presence technology, probably one of the hotter buzzwords with voip technology. From the article
That is the productivity cost of telephone tag. 384 calls to reach 69 people; 31 people missed all together.
I definitely am conceptually a fan of presence and think it has amazing applications in the workspace. Still, the article did not actually delve into the the statistical ability of presence being able to “solve” this problem, rather just trusting that we’d all assume that everything would magically be better with presence-enable communication systems.
While I think that the statistics would improve somewhat, current generation presence implementations are a little tedious because they require constant updating of location. While I think the concept of twitter, etc.. is brilliant, or at least the original concept, I’m somewhat mixed on the actual implementations. Personally, I’m not sure that I don’t really care to update this constantly, but, a lot of my friends on my personal IM list are almost scary in their detailed status descriptions.
The most convenient scenario would be an application integrated with cell-phone based GPS and various “zones”. The zones could be setup online to mark “home”, “work”, “gym”, etc..; and then could be tagged into permissions. So, while an employer might have ready access to see “work, at desk, at lunch, in meeting” zones, any out of office activities would just show up as “private”. On the other hand, most personal friends could probably care less as to what particular subset of work we are involved in at the moment, so, while they might get privy to more detailed personal updates, work might just be categorically labeled as work.
Even with those restrictions, I’m not sure that I like the overall privacy implications. GPS tracking of employees in a business environment, regardless of how it is spun, is a little creepy to say the least. Still, in small professional consulting firms, for example, that are more partner-based, it could prove invaluable.