Microsoft Lync Returning us to 1973

It's the 70's, David Bowies Life on Mars is playing on the radio, on your desk there's a notepad, pen and a telephone. Your in-tray contains some memos which need your attention. A business workflow has just started; to complete it we require some information from Gene Hunt on the second floor. We can either pick up the phone and dial his extension, or walk up the stairs to his office. It's that simple. 

(Life on Mars, (c) BBC)

Let's assume we dial (literally) his extension, there's a busy tone. We could wait a few minutes and try later or walk up the stairs to his office. We go up the stairs and knock on his office door, we open it and see that Gene is on the phone still, he holds up his hand, come back in five. Ok so we now have a choice, go find someone else who might have the information we require, or wait five minutes to speak to Gene. We wait the five minutes, get the information required, go back to our desk and complete the workflow.

Now let's jump forward to 2012. Same office, same desk, only now we have a VoIP phone, a desktop PC connected to the corporate network, and e-mail. There have been other changes also, the mesh of Internet communication allows staff that were once confined to the same building because their workflows were connected and communication between them too difficult to achieve over distance to be spread around the globe.
So using the example above we require the same information from Gene, but he's no longer based in our building, his department was moved last year to the head office site.
We can still pick up the phone and dial his extension but he's on another call so we are redirected to his voice mail. We leave him a message. We are not certain when he'll check his voice mail we send him an e-mail also.
Now we wait, we can't complete the workflow without the information from Gene and as we've requested it we've done our job, right?

Although the modern "connected" office has brought an array of new tools designed to increase efficiency we have also introduced the issue of Human Latency; the induced delay as we spend time locating who to call, how to call them, and wait for our response. Our synchronous communications; telephone calls, face to face chat have been replaced with asynchronous systems via e-mail and voice mail.

Let's review the same situation from above but this time in an environment that has invested in Microsoft Lync unified communications. We need the information from Gene to complete our workflow. Maybe first we should ask how do we know Gene will have what we need? In the 70's departments occupied the same office space, we knew everyone, we had "presence". Today we may have never have actually met Gene and know little more about him than his job title. With Lync we search for all staff within a specific department, then hover over contact cards for details of who is likely to be best to ask, or use a skill search. There are three people in our organisation that can help, but which one to ask. This is where presence comes in, mirroring reality we can determine not only who is at their desk but from that list who is most likely to be available. In the 70's we just had to look up from our desk and scan the office, Johns not at his desk, no point in asking him, Bill is on the phone he can't help right now but Sally looks to be available. It is the same with Presence in Lync, only the fact that all of the above work at different locations presents no issue to us.
We see that Gene's presence state is green  meaning he's at his desk and not on the phone. Now we need to get his attention, before we would have knocked on his door, in Lync we send him a toast, usually an IM "Hello Gene, can you spare a minute?" Once we get the reply we can choose how to continue, if its simple we may handle the whole exchange with IM, or we may swap to a voice call. If theres written information to be seen we may send him a file, or paste it into an e-mail. With Lync we can alter the mode of communication without ever leaving the client. Everything is very ubiquitous.

So we've returned to 1973, but it's improved, we have mobility. Our communication end points can be our smart phones, tablet PC's or any computer using Lync Web App.
If Gene is not at his desk he can still receive our IM, we can still one-click call his mobile from his contact card. If he's at his desk when we call but needs to go elsewhere he can move the call to his mobile. We can receive our voice mails as e-mail transcriptions with Lync / Exchange unified messaging. Voice driven auto attendants allow us to check and book meetings, or room resources, reply to e-mails and reschedule appointments from our cars hands free, on the move.

There are many reasons why Lync is a worthy investment, application level integration being up there among the top but its ability to diminish human latency is a key selling point as it's this statistic which we can easily show a positive change to ROI. Lync really is a credible replacement for IP-PBX driven telephony but it offers so much more than that it is a true end to end integrated communications platform and in that regard it stands alone.