Intermodal Collaboration - Part One
The Airport Blues
Imagine flying from Boston to San Francisco with a major airline and being expected to walk to your final ground destination. The usual ‘final-mile’ transportation connections such as taxi, bus, train, personal car or van, would simply be unavailable. Upon exiting the backbone corridor of jumbo service between BOS-SFO you would be left at the terminal to fend for yourself. It sounds absurd, but in the view of many ‘portal’ vendors, IT departments and centerbase systems providers, that is exactly what you should expect from their offerings!
In reality, without attractive intermodal transportation hubs such as most modern airports, the value of long-haul transportation to the masses would be questionable. The boundaries of the wideband transportation system must be served by a phalanx of options that serve the final mile. It is elemental to the success of the backbone and to the overall transportation solution. Transportation planners know that it is a fundamental component of the overall experience and success of the system. Odd those enterprise systems providers often don’t see this as elemental to their success.
Some suppliers have achieved success by proposing various point-solutions to enable enterprise transactions to be conducted at the intersection of the backbone and proximate resources. Mostly anecdotal, these point solutions were primarily intended to serve the control requirement of centralized management systems. Workers were biological exponents of the data and information infrastructure. They were also a bit of nuisance, since they often failed to fit into the rigid centralized models. Fortunately, carbon-based ‘assets’ are on the rise, and are being recognized not as the ‘slow part of transactions,’ but as the key knowledge ‘containers’ needed to propel the enterprise forward.
Indeed, like transportation planners, enterprise systems planners are recognizing proximate or local collaboration as a core activity. They are just beginning to accept the notion that rich intermodal collaboration environments will determine the success of the backbone systems and overall competitiveness. Only by driving multi-modal collaborative technologies will business leaders capture the ephemeral nature of users’ interactions, attention, memory and the rapid creation of totally new competitive weapons. They’ve accepted the sometimes capricious nature of the enterprise knowledge workers and are rising to the occasion by making agile intermodal collaboration an enterprise-wide priority. Like the transportation planner, they are not force-fitting backbone technologies, but empowering the end-user to select whatever mode of interaction they see fit.
Ask any passenger airline industry executive what their business is and you usually get one word, “Communications.” Nearly 75% of airline profits (when they have them) originate from the business traveler. The value provided is enabling good, old-fashioned same-time, same-place collaboration. Business pays dearly for this privilege. To provide a solution, transportation providers must enable the backbone corridors with rich, multi-modal options at the termini and gateways of the system. Enterprise IT and business managers will be most successful learning from this model. Surrounding enterprise systems with effective, intermodal collaborative technologies, provisioning and community, will drive innovation and competitiveness for years to come.
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