The importance of communication

Communication is one of the most important tools in order to maintain and develop long-term relations with co-workers, partners and customers.  Or we can state a more radical thought: communication is essential for any kind of work, success and relations.
Any interaction with another person means communication. Human relations are defined through communication. So, efficient communication allows creating positive, productive working relations. On the other hand, the lack of communication can generate misunderstandings, pressure and conflicts. In IT companies, IT business where time pressure is continuously increasing communication needs to be more and more efficient, convincing.

Communication makes the difference in life, if You are happy and successful in personal life, in work or business.
Every day we communicate with other people around us face-to-face, by phone, online. Among them: friends, family members, co-workers, partners and customers. If we don't know how to communicate with them in a mutually satisfying way then our life becomes much poorer.

Communication is the foundation of everything we do. Entrepreneurs communicate with their employees. The employees communicate among them and with existing and potential customers.   

The essence of a positive and constructive relationship is a pure and straightforward communication. Even if we are talking about IT business, where technical expressions, mathematical rules are absolutely common things, relations between people are much more complex. Emotional intelligence also has a huge importance. This is sustained by the fact that only a very small percent (some specialist says around 15-25%) of our communication is represented by verbal information exchange. The rest is body language, micro-facial reactions, voice tone and energy level.

Emotional intelligence must be also highlighted when analyzing the importance of communication. Those persons, with low emotional intelligence, will always feel difficult to effective, straight, all data transferring, but also emotionally balanced communication with fellow humans. I think the two are inseparable because we are not emotionless computer programs, even if we work with them (also computer interface, software "try to became" more intuitive, more human).  Who does not feel the importance of emotions in communication between people, cannot be a successful communicator.

Communication has a primar importance in the evolution of human society. Communication developed in parallel with the proper technical support. As industrial revolution has seen its progress, first mechanical tools and working method were in focus, in production and communication too. For a long time (almost 200 years) newspapers were the dominant communication channel.

Later, in the XX-th century, the main concern in communication was to collect, manage and distribute knowledge, information.  We can mention here the phone networks, radio and television.

And after all, the next level, the interactive communication, the boom of hard and soft, internet, communication satellites and other types of network, came with a radical change in everyday life and business, too. The spread or expansion of computer network and internet is a prove of the incredible need for faster and faster communication all over the world. Nowadays society the computer networks, especially the internet, have an essential role in globalizing communicational processes. Our informational society became "addicted" to memorizing, processing and transmittinginformation.
These fast changing tools and methods of communication change and complete the classical way of use of post, libraries, commerce, mass-media, education and so on.

If we analyze the main functions, processes or activities of a micro-sized ITC firm, we observe that in every phase, every action we need a great communication:
- getting a contract/project: business leader needs to convince potential customer about the opportunity of the project and the partnership with our firm,
- starting the project / the activity: both size need a proper communication to define perfectly the problem and the possible solution for it (if the customer needs a complex system or just a small efficient solution, if they want a licensed software or an Saas etc., which are the main characteristics of its business),
- asking and providing information about the progress of the project, expecting valuable data for being ready for deadlines,
- express constructive opinions in order to improve the product or service,

As we know, most of the time all these above are taking place under high pressure of time limits, high technical expectation, decreasing budgets etc.

Communication lines in case of a medium IT project offered by a small IT firm to a furniture producers. On the image below, we tried to highlight the big number of possible communication lines between the two firms (even if after some specialist, there should be only one line of communication between the two, for a faster and more intelligible communication different level of specialist communicate directly about their parts in project).                        Benefits of the proper communication (completed by good negotiation)

TIPS AND TRICKS:

Understand the importance of the communication, but also the importance of clear and efficient communication.
Sometimes people only think that they are communicating clearly, in fact nobody "gets the message". This problem is related to communication efficiency and communicational skills development.
Don't forget the "Two ears, one mouth" rule. Communication means also listening and paying attention to others, not only telling, demanding, commanding.
Try to understand that proper and complex communication is of a high importance in every aspects of life, including business and ITC business.
Even if this field is dominated by technical expressions and high intelligent data, the emotional part of communication can't be absent. Just like in ITC, we need both hardware and software (technical data and human approach, too).

Summary