Dealing with Communication and Information Overload

During the last ten to fifteen years, communicating through electronic communication systems such as e-mail became the de-facto standard within organizations for exchanging all kinds of information. Moreover, e-mail has not only gained tremendous importance in the business world but became also a household standard for private communication as well. In more recent years, new communication channels and platforms emerged in form of new social media such as Microblogging, Wikis, and Online Communities which demarcate a new era of communication commonly referred as Web 2.0. Thereby, not only the communication technologies have changed and improved significantly but also the attitudes and behaviors of their users. Being always online became a basic need which not only has sped-up the way business is conducted nowadays but also how individuals communicate in their free time. With the increasing number of new communication channels and platforms also the volume and intensity of communication has increased significantly. This circumstance creates new challenges for individuals but even for organizations since we have not reached a state in which information overload can be handled properly enough. In this context, we even see a fading between business hours and free time requiring new solutions to meet the growing demand of users for flexible yet easy to use communication solutions.As a consequence, one can observe a trend towards unified communication solu-tions within organizations to meet and manage the aforementioned challenges while being able to benefit from these developments at the same time. Given the ongoing blossoming of all kinds of communication solutions, enterprises are confronted with the question which technology to adopt and how to integrate it into the corporate environment while at the same time identifying which business value these communication solutions really have and how they affect business process performance and ultimately enterprise success.