Communication Breakdown

With the amount of communication lines available today, it’s never been easier to keep in touch with friends, family, business associates, etc. These lines have allowed the information age to transition to the knowledge economy which has now become the “Intangible Economy”. If you’re asking yourself: “Intangible what!?” you are not alone. I only just stumbled upon it while doing my research for this article.





Wikipedia defines the Intangible Economy as including the following criteria:

- Knowledge assets (what people know and put into use)
- Collaboration assets (who people interact with to create value)
- Engagement assets (the level of energy and commitment of people)
- Time quality (how quickly value is created)

According wikipedia, these are the four key resources from which economic activity and competitive advantage are primarily derived and delivered today. It is evident that if it were not for all of our available lines of communications, the intangible economy could not be possible. So what happens when the lines of communications are broken?

When Led Zeppelin released ‘Communication Breakdown’ in 1969, they were referring to the communication lines between two people. Today, the lines of communications span the globe, offering seemingly endless channels. From cell phones to the internet, our thirst for continuous connectivity has steadily grown in the past 20+ years. The result is a deep dependency on electronic networks and devices which leave some of us helpless when they fail. So much so, that many companies incur significant costs and considerable loss in sales and productivity whenever any portion of their electronic infrastructure fails.

In April of 2007, Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) experienced a disruption in service which lasted approximately 10 hours and affected every Blackberry user in North America. A large portion of the 8 million worldwide Blackberry subscribers were without email functionality during the outage. The impact was important enough to affect the Canadian government, as well as generate several news headlines. CTV reported:

"We all lost our data when we were in the House of Commons last night. The sound of BlackBerrys being thrown against the desk was deafening for a while,'' Liberal MP Garth Turner told The Canadian Press.

"Because it has become the de facto channel of communications around this place, it actually impacts on the government of Canada and the work of the whole House of Commons.''

In this particular situation, only a single service provider was affected, so other means of communication were still available. However, what would happen if we lost access to all internet, email, and telephony services? I doubt companies and/or governments could effectively exchange information by simply using smoke signals. Besides, communicating in this fashion would likely conflict with the Kyoto Protocol.

Luckily, the world has not yet experienced a total communication breakdown; one where all lines were broken. Given the vast array of networks, and the world’s extensive communication infrastructure, it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever. Still, any communication breakdown further affirms the importance of these networks, without which the Digital Firm could not effectively exist.