When you’re in a room filled with information-technology experts and you’re not a techie, it’s easy to think you’ve stumbled into a foreign-language class.
That was the case Tuesday afternoon at the “Convergent Technologies” seminar at the Milleridge Inn in Jericho, where the arcane acronyms were flying: VoIP, SIP, and IVR, to name a few.
To the less tech savvy, that’s voiceover Internet protocol, a technology that allows phone calls to be made over the Internet; session initiation protocol and interactive voice response, both used for interactive communication.
While that’s Greek to the uninitiated, what’s clear is that those technologies and others will dramatically alter the way companies work in the not-too-distant future, a group of panelists told the gathering sponsored by the Long Island chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals.
One of the panelists, Daniel Hoffman, the chief executive of M5 Networks, a Manhattan company that specializes in Internet phone systems, predicts that in five to 10 years, the traditional phone system, with its switching and routing networks, will be dead.
“It’s a big economic weight that is anchoring you to a location,” he said in an interview. “People need to work where they need to work. That’s the way the world is moving.”
Offices of the future will have high tech-phones, he said, that can be plugged in anywhere, making it easier to move people around to work in teams.
“The whole idea of a fixed desk goes away,” he said.
But the office of the future will also feature more Big Brother aspects that have to considered.
“Managers are going to get a lot more information about what is going on,” he said. That info might include transcripts of a conversation an employee has with customers and that the manager might critique later on.
This has implications for both legal and privacy issues, he said.
--Carrie Mason-Draffen