The Internet, broadband access, camera phones, voice-over-IP, instant messaging, social networking, video uploading — all make obvious the increasing importance of communications and connectivity in our daily lives.

But what does all of this connectedness, this addiction to sharing information every moment of every day, mean for businesses and organizations? What decisions will companies have to make to ensure this "connectedness" becomes a competitive advantage? Where are the opportunities and challenges? What are the implications for employees, senior management and CIOs?

To answer these questions, Nortel tasked IDC to conduct a global study of almost 2,400 working adults in 17 countries. The study focused on quantifying the state of today's connectedness, tracking its acceptance and use across devices and applications as well as determining the pace of its growth and impact on the enterprise.

Here's the essence of what we found — enterprises around the world are facing an exploding "culture of connectivity." Not only is 16% of the global information workforce already "Hyperconnected," more significantly, another 36% will be joining them soon!

This evolution towards increasing levels of connectivity will have a profound impact on enterprises, creating challenges in managing these new tools of connectivity while providing information securely and reliably, and ensuring that this connectivity is productive.

So CIOs and IT business managers take note:

• Based on the number of respondents in certain clusters and then factoring in the rate of workers entering the workforce and retiring and likely adoption rates — we estimate that the 16% of the total information workforce currently "hyperconnected" may soon increase to 40%.
• The hyperconnected depend on the devices and applications that make them hyperconnected — 47% said a network outage at work would have an extreme impact on them. Technology supporting the hyperconnected has become mission critical!
• The boundary between work and personal connectivity for the hyperconnected is almost nonexistent. Two-thirds use text or instant messaging for both work and personal use. More than a third use social networking for both. The freedom to conduct work during personal time will force changes to personal use policies, business practices, training curricula, and IT support policies.
• The migration to Hyperconnectivity will create a profusion of devices, applications, and new business processes. Already, the average hyperconnected individual uses at least nine devices to access the network and seven connectivity applications. This profusion will create the need for a strategy and architecture for unified communications across the enterprise if an orderly migration is to occur.
• As baby boomers retire, businesses will find themselves competing within today's hyperconnected base of talent. Is your company ready to compete in the emerging war for talent? Tomorrow's workforce will increasingly expect to work in a hyperconnected communications environment and many will consider this a condition of employment.
• Connectivity tools in the hands of employees may increase productivity, but they also increase the risk of the release of sensitive information to the outside world. Already a fourth of hyperconnected respondent companies use blogs and wikis to communicate with customers and other outsiders. Obtaining the benefits and avoiding the risks of Hyperconnectivity will require unprecedented cooperation between CIOs and their business counterparts.

It won't be possible to ignore this new level of connectivity. Businesses can either embrace it and manage it carefully or, stand-by as it enters their enterprise, in a confusion of disconnected deployments that squander the productivity and competitive advantage Hyperconnectivity could otherwise bring.

The survey identified four groups of users — Hyperconnected, the Increasingly Connected, Passive Online and Barebones Users. To find out who they are, how each group's communications habits compare to the others and why they are creating the need for a unified communications strategy and architecture enterprise if an orderly migration is to occur, see page 3 of IDC White Paper at www.nortel.com/idcstudy.

The Web may have been invented in Switzerland, and Internet commerce pioneered in the United States, but the quest for personal connectivity has no national boundaries. In fact, the country with the highest percentage of hyperconnected respondents in the study was China; the country with the highest percentage of increased Hyperconnectivity was Russia. Meanwhile, Canada and the United Arab Emirates had the fewest number of the hyperconnected respondents among the 17 countries included in the study.

Each country, each region has a different connectivity landscape. But there are two common characteristics to all countries: (1) the inexorable growth of hyperconnected individuals, and (2) therefore the need for enterprises to be on top of this growth if they are to compete in the global marketplace.

See complete outline with graphs of Hyperconnectivity trends worldwide as well as across North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, page 5 of IDC White Paper at www.nortel.com/idcstudy

The behavior and attitudes of this small group of hyperconnected individuals indicates change ahead for the enterprise. Here is a summary of some key findings.

For full details and statistics on how Hyperconnectivity is impacting the enterprise now and into the future, see page 7 of IDC White Paper at www.nortel.com/idcstudy.

• The line between business use and personal use for devices and applications is blurring. To support the business use, enterprises may find themselves supporting personal use — with all the attendant security, privacy, and management headaches. Increased mobility will also make it harder for enterprises to monitor the workforce.
• The hyperconnected expect to work in a rich communication environment and consider the newer solutions as conditions for employment.
• The tools and applications favored by the hyperconnected offer advantages when it comes to collaboration and communication with customers, but they also increase the risk of the inadvertent release of sensitive data and the need to comply with regulations on privacy protection and legal discovery.

What we have learned about the state of Hyperconnectivity today, its pace of adoption, and its observable impact on organizations suggests a clear call to action. And while the focus of the survey was on end users, it's clear that the broader business opportunities come with tightly linking existing and new communications capabilities into business processes.

The trick will be to balance the risks of deploying and supporting these new communications tools with the risks of not supporting them. The former risk may never go away, but the latter will surely get bigger.

For full recommendations and strategies for CIOs see 'Call to Action' on page 18 of IDC White Paper at www.nortel.com/idcstudy