The human attributes of creativity, aspiration, decision making and intelligence are the foundations to creating wealth.  Meanwhile, there is an equal abundance of human attributes that stand in the way; the most notable being that as we creatively apply our intelligence, we invariably become unpredictable. Can modern communications technology overcome the conflict of this inherent volatility with the demand for rigorous yet agile business processes?  As organizations strive to become more service oriented, they harness creativity and intelligence to their output.

As a creative and intelligent species, we are liable to change our minds.  We are influenced by things going on around us in this complex world, other than the matter at hand.  We have all heard of – or experienced - human error interrupting business processes, and the way we get round this unpredictability is meeting or picking up the phone and talking to each other. This can only happen successfully if we are available to talk, if we want to talk, and if we have the right information to hand to make the conversation meaningful.

According to Forrester Research, 25% of work projects grind to a halt and 63% of projects are delayed because critical decision-makers can’t be reached. Meanwhile 75% of companies take one day or longer to schedule and confirm meeting attendees.

Agility is defined as "the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change." Human communications is at the heart of all three of these functions. Human latency (the time it takes people to respond to events) reduces an enterprise's ability to respond and to be agile. And yet, as we can see, the simple availability of people is the biggest barrier to agility.

To be a service orientated enterprise, organizations are looking at ways to use IT differently - they are investigating and adopting Service Orientated Architectures (SOA). They are creating an IT architecture that is aligned to their business processes; in effect their market facing units determine how IT needs to support them versus IT determine how they will support the business.

BT has launched a number of work streams to research the potential to create Service Oriented Communications (SOC) architectures in the belief that a SOC is a critical component in the journey to becoming a Service Oriented Enterprise. SOC is an approach that tightly integrates business processes and applications with unified communications technologies. A SOC environment should be able to sense business events and then automatically connect people to people whether internal employees, partners or suppliers. ASOC environment will compress and transform the business process through Unified Communications and Collaboration technology integration.

Every business process requires people to interact, make a decision and intervene at key moments.  SOC means that when those key moments are recognised by the core business applications, the enterprise communications platform will seek out the required individuals or delegates and create the optimum platform – phone call, video conference, web chat or conference call – through which they can interact, decide and intervene. 

The objective of SOC is to remove human latency and to put predictability back into the business process.  There is far more to consider than technology if SOC is to be a success.  Human latency and unpredictability is a by-product of creativity and intelligence.  Implementing SOC has to be mindful of the potential to stifle creativity and intelligence. But so has implementing any automated business process and it’s fair to say that to date organisations have managed to blend process with the upside of our human nature.