Asynchronous Communications

With a background in Electrical and Computer Engineering, I find it fascinating when concepts that function and enable communications on the scale of Gigahertz also provide benefit on the scale that we normally live in.

In electrical engineering terms, asynchronous means that there is no common clock between two communicating devices.  For our purposes, it means that I can send a message to you, without you being there, and yet you still receive it - think email, for example.  I send it to you and sometime in the future, you read it and respond.  We don't have to be there at the same time to achieve viable, useful conversation.

No big deal right?  We've had mail for years, and it's the same thing?

Actually, I think it's such a big deal that it borders on magical.  When you look at the kinds of things that are happening on the Internet right now, and you look closely, you'll notice that something very different is actually taking place.  Because I can send an asynchronous communication out to the net in the form of a message that is not transient (like email can be, although it can be archived) and in a format that can be read anywhere on the planet, I'm now part of an ever increasing pool of knowledge that is a direct result of the group think of the human race.  Look at the comments that come at the end of a really popular blog post - they can be far longer than the post itself, and can contain nuggets of wisdom or corrections that have intrinsic value in themselves.

The longevity of these messages is important too - they stick around.  Conversations can go on for years, laying dormant for a while until the topic flairs up again due to current events.  All the while, we're capturing knowledge.

With these resources at our disposal, what does it mean for the enterprise?  How do we leverage these technologies?  Can our aging workforce provide insight for employees in the years to come, long after they have retired? 

For me, the essence of Enterpise 2.0 is bringing the full force of technology to bear on the problem of how we can communicate better, smarter and faster. 

Surely we can do better than this, for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/06/14/business/14email.graphix.ready.html