An interesting day spent today at a conference run by IDC looking at the world of Unified Communications (the convergence of telephone, mobile and data).
The main observations that I had out of the back of the event was that there seems to be little or no unification of mobile and fixed-line technologies at present (mainly because of network operators trying to protect dwindling revenue streams), and that the only conduits for inter-organisational unification of communications are email standards (ie SMTP), and the old fashioned telephone networks (which these days are increasingly emulations running over IP networks).
I'm also becoming more and more convinced that organisations are going to have to get used to not controlling information about the people who work for them. Simply put, if my employer wants me to keep updates of where I am, who I am working with and what I am doing, I'm afraid it's going to have to be worth something to me as well as to them. That's the reason why my LinkedIn page is the place where I mostly keep that kind of information to hand. If LinkedIn could chain themselves to an identity service (say OpenID), they could have the potential to be the directory enquiries for the 21st century…
mmitII 