Communication Reliability

I was in the USA last week with a group of colleagues. One of the issue we were talking about was service levels of collaborative and communication solutions. We had quite a good discussion on the difference on reliability and availability requirements. The interesting part of the discussions being on the difference between the actual availability requirements and the perceived availability requirements.

One of my arguments was that we all have so many different communication mechanisms available to us, does it matter if one of them is unavailable for a period of time. We perceive that we need all of them all of the time, but is that really true.

Unfortunately my sub-conscience decided that it would undertake an experiment on this thesis and caused me leave my mobile phone in the taxi that took us to the airport .

I am now one of those “mobile phone left in taxi” statistics .

Thankfully the taxi driver was an honest sole and phone my home to tell my wife of this fact. Unfortunately, know that I had no mobile phone, she was unable to contact me. As it was the early hours of the morning I didn’t contact her until I was back in the UK the next day. Hopefully one of my colleagues who is based in the USA will be able to collect it this week, and he is over in the UK next week.

I wonder how crucial to my work having a mobile phone is? I have four days to find out before the joys of holiday.