There was a recent flurry of blogs lately from industry pundits on the topic of “human latency” and how to solve this communication problem.

No, human latency doesn’t mean “humans who work late.” According to one of my favorite definitions, which was included in a recent blog posted on No Jitter, human latency is the “delay in a business process that results when human interaction or intervention is required.” This was written by Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research, and in response to a previous post by No Jitter’s Eric Krapf.

For his part, Krapf contends that human latency is “the time it takes for workers to move from one communications channel – say email – to another one – say, the telephone – to respond to whatever issue they have to deal with.”

The pundit who sparked this No Jitter blog thread was Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, who posted two relevant blogs to the site. One blog delved into the topic of Mobile UC, called Mobile Unified Communications Provides More Bang For The Buck Than On The Desktop. The other blog is Presence, not VoIP is the Foundation of Unified Communications.

Like DiVitas, Kerravala is keen on Presence and mobility – two key technology components of full-blown Mobile Unified Communications (Instant Messaging is the third.) He says “mobility also raises the value proposition of integrated Presence …. time is a precious commodity when a user is mobile, so trying to reach users that aren’t available is frustrating and time wasting – so – having knowledge of the user’s Presence before you try and reach that person is critical. Integrated Presence on a mobile device will allow us to maximize productivity …”

There’s more. As I said, the Mobile Unified Communications pundits have been a chatty bunch recently s – and it hasn’t all come from No Jitter. Unified Communications (UC) Strategies analyst, Art Rosenberg, also chimed in with his blog on Presence, Human Latency, and Telephone Calls.

Rosenberg acknowledges the communication problems caused by human latency when he says, “Because UC involves making contact with and responding to people, the real value of UC will have to be found at the communication end points … this means looking at the flexibility and efficiency of user interfaces for communication and the devices that support such interfaces to make people an efficient part of time-sensitive work flow processes, regardless of their location and environment.”

According to Rosenberg, Presence alone can’t solve the human latency problem. Rather, a combination of Presence and IM is the solution. In his blog he says, “Rather than guessing about the availability of the person to take a phone call, Presence information and IM communication allow the contact initiator to check for accessibility to a call recipient and request permission via IM to make a call before blindly making a call attempt.”

In the world of business communications, human latency translates to a whole lot of missed calls, voicemails, more missed calls, maybe some IMing, text messaging and perhaps even an email or two in the mix. It’s about one person trying to contact another in order to extend a thought as simple as “I need to sit in on this conference, what’s the bridge number?” Or it can be as complex as “How should we solve this customer’s problem?”

Human latency is about not being able to reach the right person at the right time, the resulting delay in communication … and the business consequences of inefficient communication. Mobile UC is squarely directed at solving this problem, and it uses Presence, IM and mobility (seamless roaming between WiFi and cellular networks) as its key weapons in this war on human latency.