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Thursday, June 29, 2006

IT Responsibilities for UC

BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS REVIEW / JUNE 2006

How Unified Communications Will Affect Enterprise IT
by Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As telephony is increasingly integrated with messaging and other apps, IT will be challenged to manage communications technology effectively.

It’s not uncommon to hear enterprise IT managers and end users say that they now find email to be a more mission-critical business tool than the telephone. And a recent industry survey suggests such preferences are becomingmore common.

The “Communications of the Association of Computer Machinery,” the journal of the world’s oldest computer association, recently published a survey assessing the “richness” of various forms of communications. The highest ranking wasn’t much of a surprise—face-to-face meetings. The rest of the survey, however, was more startling. While the telephone received a perceived “richness” score of 25.91 (out of a maximum of 40), email achieved an almost identical score of 25.83. According to the study report, “This surprising result may signal that frequent email use and technologies such as instant messaging, automatic messaging and voice mail may blur the perceived differences in the richness of email and the phone.”

The study report concludes, “The main lesson learned is that distributed (business) relationships involving complex tasks can be maintained by increasing the frequency and flow of (all forms of) communication.”

Trends such as the one described in this study, and the conclusion it draws, set the stage for thecoming breakthroughs in unified communications (UC). As voice communications become more mobile and real-time and asynchronous messaging increasingly become an acceptable substitute for voice, we will see a more seamless integration of telephony with messaging, as well as the use of multimodal desktop and handheld multimodal devices.

What Is UC?

Last spring’s VoiceCon 2006 was a landmark conference for the enterprise communications industry because at this event, all the major technology providers acknowledged the convergence of communication applications, i.e., wired and wireless telephony, multimodal messaging, mobile interfaces, and SIP-based presence management, etc., generally described under the label of “unified communications.”

Cisco, which has already become a major player in IP-telephony, and Microsoft, which is taking another run at the telephony space, publicly joined the other major vendors in announcing new UC applications. These will be open messaging technologies that integrate with basic IP telephony functions (as currently embodied in the IP-PBX) and a variety of multimodal communication endpoint devices to support more flexible, personalized business communications.

This is a new and different, even a “next-gen” version of unified communications, since it embraces all channels and modalities of business communication contacts. Unified Communications (UC) can be defined as the flexible integration of real-time conferencing (voice, video, instant messaging) with unified asynchronous messaging (UM). UC has been talked about for years as being the multimodal solution for providing greater flexibility and efficiency. However, until the advent of standards-based IP-telephony, UC could not be easily or cost-effectively implemented across different proprietary telephone systems or messaging services, and therefore its market prospects languished.

UC will facilitate the integration of IP-telephony applications (call management and conferencing) with all forms of messaging, which themselves have already been consolidating under the label of unified messaging. UC and UM will be joined at the user-interface hip on converged, multimodal communication end user devices, as well as at the “presence management” level of communication applications and federated directories.

The UC Provider’s View

We did a quick survey of some enterprise vendors for this article. We wanted an update of their UC offerings particularly for IP-telephony applications, their support for hosted application services, their IP endpoint device support, and their views of enterprise market migration activity.

Our participants included the big traditional enterprise telephone system providers who own the bulk of the legacy TDM PBX, voice mail, and call center installed base that will be migrating to UC, as well as IP-PBX players. These include Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, Mitel and Siemens in the telephony market, and Microsoft, which dominates the enterprise email market, but is adding instant messaging and unified communications in partnership with IP-telephony offerings. Other providers are focusing on specific UC application packages. These players include Interactive Intelligence, Adomo and Citrix.

Although there were no real surprises, here are some highlights based on the responses:

■ While most UC technology providers are starting to offer many new IP-telephony features and functions that support UC and UM, the new products are lagging mostly in the integration of IP telephony for wireless mobility. Several CPE providers have announced managed and hosted software services, but the industry is still getting its offerings aligned with the pure service providers like network, wireless and ISP services.

■ Most enterprise CPE providers support traditional intra-enterprise communication activity reporting for end users, but integrating such reporting with external services activity, e.g., mobile usage, is still evolving.

■ No enterprise organizations are buying UC technology just because it is now becoming available. Although end of life-cycle and “greenfield” situations drive replacement of TDM telephony, every organization is requiring specific operational justifications, which must come from the business management and end-user side of the house, not from IT.

■ Installing an IP-PBX doesn’t have a significant influence on implementing other IP-telephony applications such as voice messaging, customer contact routing, IVR self-service applications, etc., nor on replacing desktop phones with “hard,” screen-based IP phones.

■ Enterprise technology decision-making for migrating to IP-telephony and UC is still mainly focused on the CIO and IT management, but providers report that consultants are also key decision makers.

■ Although end users don’t influence general UC implementation decisions, individual end user needs within the enterprise are a significant factor for migrating to desktop and laptop softphones, unified messaging systems and wireless mobility. This also reinforces the role of business management as leading decision makers for mobile communications.

■ CFOs are only rated high as important decision makers (after CIOs and IT management) when an enterprise is moving to hosted IP communication services versus CPE procurements.

■ CEOs aren’t rated high up in the UC migration decision-making, except in the small/medium business (SMB) market segment.

UC Focus On Microsoft, IBM For Text Messaging and Business Process Applications

UC is not just about voice communications, but its flexible interoperability with text messaging and business applications as well. So it is important to look at what the two dominant enterprise email and instant messaging providers, Microsoft and IBM, are doing with UC.

As we all know, Microsoft is dramatically restructuring itself (again) to focus on services and people, under the label of “Windows Live.” This initiative is also bringing Microsoft into the world of telephony at a time that telephony is becoming an open communications application.

According to Zig Serafin, general manager of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, the company is integrating IP-telephony into familiar visual desktop application interfaces that end users are already comfortable with. This makes particular sense at the desktop, since legacy telephone sets were always very limited by their numeric touch-tone pad for input and a small screen display—or none at all—for informational output.

According to Serafin, Microsoft is also pushing very heavily into mobile communications through Office Communicator Mobile software, and into voice self-service applications development tools (IVRs) to serve both customer contacts as well as any mobile device application for internal users. The speech application interface is being pursued through Microsoft’s Speech Server 2007 platform for IP-IVR application development to support TDM telephony integrations, as well as supporting native SIP for presence management and multimodal customer contacts in the future.

Microsoft is betting on its strength in the enterprise email and instant messaging/presence management market to embed enterprise UC on its Live Communication Server (LCS) platform, and in Office Communicator, and Office Communicator Mobile clients. It is also targeting the mobile market with its Windows CE and Pocket PC operating systems and aiming at wireless carriers in the 3G space to support inter-enterprise communications, by federating Active Directory functions.

Microsoft’s chief competitor in the enterprise text messaging and presence market is IBM. Although they did not participate in our survey, IBM is teaming with Cisco in migrating their whole company to IP-telephony and UC. They also are leveraging their Lotus Sametime instant messaging product with a “customized plug-in” to support federated presence between Cisco’s Call-Manager (IP-PBX) and Unified Presence Serverto provide “click-to-call” and“click-to-chat” contact options to their internal users.

It will be interesting to see how the telecommunications provider industry slowly restructures itself around the convergence of software communication applications, multimodal wired and wirelesscommunication devices, and network services vs. CPE options. Perhaps these email and IM providers will drive the consolidation of IT administration tools for unified communications.

The Complexities Of Managing UC Technology

But the vendors are only half the picture. UC will onlysucceed in the enterprise if IT managers and staff are able to master its complexities and deliver the promised benefits.

The road to enterprise implementation of UC is paved with the complexity of many new technology “convergences” that will rock the legacy silos of enterprise IT management. “Convergence” may mean either interoperable “integrations” between different application servers or actual consolidation of software technology at all levels, i.e., network, servers, software clients, and—last, but not least—device form factors and user interfaces.

These convergences and integrations include:

IP data networks for real-time and non real-time applications, wired and wireless.

■ Seamless 3G and Wi-Fi wireless access and call transfer to wired devices.

■ Platform-independent software application servers.

■ Device-independent, interface-independent client software for user application functions.

■ Integrating business contact routing with personal availability and accessibility routing.

■ Converging individual contact access across wireless services and internal enterprise servers (CPE).

■ Managing one-number/one mailbox business contacts for both voice and text on a single mobile device that will also serve the end user for personal (i.e., consumer) mobile communications services.

■ SIP-based user presence and availability management across all contact modalities, federated across networks and enterprises.

■ Multimodal, device-independent, self-service business applications for both internal enterprise users and customers.

■ Security management across all forms of business communication access.

■ Business activity management reporting across all forms of contact and communications at individual user levels, group levels and customer contact levels.

■ Using presence management for “virtual” customer assistance/help desk support within the
enterprise, across enterprises, across contact modalities and from outsourced staffing services and distributed experts.

■ Differentiating and reconciling business contact priorities from individual end user availability priorities.

Given the changes that IP telephony and presence management will enable for end users, devices and communication application functionality, it should be no surprise that end users and business management are not yet aware of all the new operational benefits that are just becoming available. It should also be no surprise that IT technology management will not be too anxious to make changes when the complexities of their responsibilities are neither clear nor justified by demand from their end users. The old “chicken and egg” problem remains!

Summary

Now that unified IP communication technologies are finally becoming available to support the convergence of “open” voice telephony communications, videoconferencing and text messaging at the device-independent user interface level, enterprise IT organizations have to start planning realistically to migrate their existing technologies and organizations selectively and gracefully. This will require both restructuring of IT responsibilities and learning new skill sets,
particularly for the shift of mission-critical voice communications from hardware to standards-based software applications.

IT will have to realign itself to support the new IP network infrastructure that will provide device independent, multimodal communications with people both inside and outside of the organization. This responsibility will be operationally organized around the network transport level (wired, wireless), the server platform infrastructures (hardware, OS), the application software server level for both business processes and personal communications and, last, but not least, at the users’ device software client levels.

Such technologies may be enterprise owned, provided as a hosted/managed service or a combination of both. The real enterprise IT migration challenge, however, is to continue to support all existing, legacy technologies that will interoperate and integrate with the new, IP-based communications.

Enterprise migration planning for UC and IPtelephony applications should start now, in terms of understanding new requirements for both business management and end users in the context of multimodal communications capabilities. UC implementation is not just VOIP networking infrastructure, nor just IP-telephony, nor the various modalities of messaging. It’s about exploiting the benefits of seamless interoperability of all the above.

Because UC and IP-telephony applications will now be more standards-based, device independent software, there will be new choices for selecting implementation providers for both premises-based technology and hosted “on demand” services. The current lack of hands-on experience with still-evolving UC technologies in most enterprise IT organizations suggests that there is a critical need for them to get expert outside help. Now that the provider industry is starting to deliver IP-based communication technology products, independent consultants are starting to gain real experience with real UC products and services, not only how interoperable they are with TDM technology and business applications, but also how much new functionality and manageability they offer today and “future-proofed” for tomorrow.

Look for enterprise IT organizations and those supporting them to:

■ Develop strategic operational requirements for all the various forms of person-to-
person communication applications.

■ Perform necessary network assessments to support VOIP QOS and IP-telephony traffic.

■ Project implementation costs and expected ROI benefits in terms of both reduced costs and increased user communication productivity.

■ Plan the tactical migration from existing communication technologies to centralized, IP-based “best-of-breed” or “suites” of interoperable communication applications.

■ Prepare end users for UC from a variety of devices and mobile services.

■ Provide assistance in realigning IT support organizations for the future UC environment.

Even if the technology were free, migrating to the benefits of unified communications will not be simple and it’s not something you have done before!

____________________________________________
Rosenberg’s Third Law Of Business Communications

A few years ago, as part of a conference presentation on IP-telecommunications as the drivers for innovation in person-to-person communications, I came up with my “Third Law” for business communications, which states:

"The faster and easier it is to get information,
the more we will still need to contact people!"

The reasoning behind this is that people, not just information databases nor even automated business processes, make the important decisions and make things happen. People also make the data entry mistakes that cause automated business processes to generate problems that have to be fixed by people.

It’s just not enough to get all the information you want; you still have to deal with people to get things done or resolved as a result of the information you can get so easily. So, the faster you get information, good or bad, the more you will be following up with people with questions, requests for assistance, approvals and help in task completion.

As both information and people become more accessible on line through the Web, it is now convenient for Rosenberg’s Third Law to be facilitated by person-to-person multimodal contacts embedded in online information and documentation. This can be done by email, instant messaging, or voice connections. Most importantly, SIP-based presence and availability management technology will make such contact attempts more “intelligent” and controllable, rather than time-wasting “blind” calls and messages.

___________________________________
Making Telephony Applications “Virtual”

With UC’s emphasis on interoperability and federation among network elements, the traditional advantages of CPE over service provider offerings will disappear. Hosted “on demand” service options will be particularly useful for trialing and/or selectively implementing the migration to unified communications to make the transition easier, faster, less disruptive and more cost effective.

This alternative opens the door for both IP telephony and UC technologies to be provided by a combination of software application developers, endpoint device manufacturers and network service providers that offer a choice of open application services—rather than being restricted to the closed, proprietary world of traditional TDM telephony hardware providers.

Enterprise IT management thus has two new major responsibilities to its business end-users:

■ Make them aware of the capabilities and potential benefits of UC technologies, so that business management can identify and define business value to justify the costs of IPtelephony migration.

■ Select and support the products and services that will be most cost effective, reliable, flexible and “future-proof” for device-independent end-user needs, as well as being interoperable with existing communication technologies.

To effectively fulfill those responsibilities, enterprise IT must look beyond just infrastructure cost-savings, and understand what end users really need in order to do their jobs better in the future.

_____________________________________
Micro-productivity And Macro-productivity

A few years ago, the Unified-View proposed the idea of new metrics for quantifying efficient person-to-person communication contacts. We anticipated that IP communications technologies based on the evolving SIP standard, coupled with presence management data, would enable the necessary information to be collected for such communication activity.

Our definition of communication microproductivity is based upon metrics for both real-time contact accessibility (phone calls, IM) and asynchronous message delivery and responsiveness for an individual user when communicating with others.

Our definition of macro-productivity is a “group” metric that can be compiled from the individual micro-productivity ratings of a group of users with particular responsibilities for task involvement.

Quantifying such communication productivity will be an important way to not only confirm the value of mobile and UC technologies, but also to ensure that such new capabilities are being effectively used by appropriate categories of end users.

Minimizing Business Process Delays From People

The challenge for enterprise IT management of “why” to migrate to UC is twofold,
especially for CIOs in larger enterprise organizations. They not only have to make a
“hard dollar” ROI case for reducing technology infrastructure capex and opex costs,
but they also have to help justify changing how end-users will communicatewith each other, from a business process perspective.

The latter has unfortunately been viewed as only a “soft dollar” productivity benefit, which has been hard to quantify or predict in advance. However, that doesn’t mean that there are no important “hard dollar” consequences like lost revenue or financial penalties for missing deadlines, or other costs for not fixing a time-critical operational problem.

Most early attempts at quantifying “communication productivity” zeroed in on guesstimates of individual user time savings. Although such benefits won’t always go to the enterprise bottom line, they can be useful for gaining end user interest and acceptance. However, UC technology combined with wireless mobility will introduce significant change in how and when people communicate, and will generate more variety in endpoint devices that must interoperate. As a result, it will be difficult for enterprise IT to intelligently quantify and justify what the organization will need for its different types of users and their changing communication needs.
While well-designed user interfaces and device “intelligence” can simplify communication procedures for individual end users, this only helps improve personal productivity, what we have termed “microproductivity.”

Such time savings could amount to as much as 30 minutes a day, according to studies, but only for people who do a lot of calling and messaging. However, such benefits don’t eliminate the delays to mission-critical tasks or situations caused whenever a key member of a group is not in contact, accessible in real time or responsive in a timely manner to asynchronous messaging. Such lack of contact degrades the performance of the rest of the group.

To really make the enterprise more productive as a whole, UC implementations must be geared toward the goal of increasing “macro-productivity,” so that operational business tasks are accomplished by people in both timely and efficient ways.

Companies Mentioned In This Article
Adomo (www.adomo.com)
Avaya (www.avaya.com)
Cisco (www.cisco.com)
Citrix (www.citrix.com)
IBM (www.ibm.com)
Interactive Intelligence (www.inin.com)
Microsoft (www.microsoft.com)
Mitel (www.mitel.com)

Art Rosenberg is principal of the United View, www. unified-view.com, and independent analyst, speaker, writer and consultant in this area.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Our Initial Vision of Unified Communications


unified communications -  unified messaging - the unified view
Representing the Users Perspective of Unified Communications
All contents copyrighted material
Copyright © 2000-2001 The Unified-View, All rights reserved worldwide

Editorial from 01-24-00

Do Users Need Unified Messaging or Unified Communications?

The convergence of communications technologies is putting fresh emphasis on the real and dynamic needs of individual users, more so than on the rather vague model of the enterprise or the department. We are still talking about business environments, so we can't simply label such usage as consumer or small-office-based. The individual user is still the driver of person-to-person communications usage, whether it is practical functionality they seek or simply personal preferences. However, we do have to start thinking about cross-media messaging options and real-time connections as important components of individual responsive communications.

Market studies indicate that the technology managers within enterprise organizations have not yet become too excited about unified messaging because they either don't know what the value proposition is or because end users haven't exactly broken down the doors to request such new capabilities. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that no one will want it when such capabilities finally become easily and cost-effectively available. Like the air that we breathe, personal communications is essential to daily existence, and it's only now that digital information and wireless connections are becoming fully integrated into traditional modes of contact. Although we have always viewed today's conveniences as tomorrow's necessities, we can't really rely on a gee-whiz convenience to drive user demand. Ultimately, it must be a real need that will make new technologies useful, and unified communications/messaging is no exception. So, who needs the benefits of managing all phone calls and messaging activity in a unified way?

In a Unified Messaging Consortium market study report written over a year ago, we identified the basic reasons that users might need (and therefore ask for) the facilities of unified communications and messaging. They either get a lot of calls and messages, and thus have a pressing need to manage and control their personal communications traffic, or, perhaps more importantly, they must be accessible and able to respond immediately to the needs of others. This is an outward looking view of personal communications, rather than an inward looking one, but if you think about it, communicating with others is not only about your needs as a message recipient, but also about the needs of others. So, although saving message retrieval time with a unified, multimedia mailbox is a practical messaging objective, if you can't reply quickly and conveniently, either by voice or text messaging or a real-time voice connection, it's not good enough.

Traditional voicemail statistics showed that around 70 percent of voicemail messages were generated by secondary telephone answering activities, i.e., a one-way voice message generated as second prize because a real-time connection could not be established. With the projected increase in Internet-based messaging activity, that number will probably drop, but certainly not disappear, as users exploit public two-way messaging. But it can't be just messaging alone that is involved; it has to include the real-time voice connection option as well, depending upon the particular circumstances.

We don't remember the exact statistics, but there have always been a significant number of one-way voicemail and answering machine messages that simply said, "Call me!" So, we must make it possible for message recipients to easily respond to the sender, not only by a reply message, but also via a real-time connection, when appropriate. This applies not only for responding to telephone answering voice messages that were originally meant for a real-time conversation, but even to email messages that may have circumstantially gathered increased priority for a real-time contact.

Although instant messaging capabilities may be useful in those cases when data files have to be exchanged online or tricky multi-tasking of extraneous voice conversations with real-time text messaging is needed, the more traditional voice conversational connection will usually be more effective. We expect voice-over-Internet to help facilitate the cross-media and cross-modal flexibility of unified personal communications. However, to migrate gracefully into the future, the convergence of call and message management still has to work with both the new and old telephone network and device technologies.

Respectfully,
Rosenberg and Zimmer
Unified View

Friday, June 23, 2006

The Third Business Communication Paradigm Shift – Using Search Technology to Contact People

Copyright © 2006 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Business communication activity is comprised of three main elements from a user perspective - information access, business process transactions, and initiating (and receiving) contacts with people. The Internet and World Wide Web are changing how all three are being done.

Information Search

By now, everyone knows how dramatically the World Wide Web has impacted access to all kinds of information; it’s like living in a giant “virtual” library. Combined with the power of natural language text search tools, we can easily find all kinds of documents, including personal information and messages stored on our own private PCs. We can also get information notification dynamically delivered by email through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology as soon as it becomes “published” on a web site. Finally, people and automated processes that have our email address can send us information ranging from unwanted “spam” to important, time sensitive information.

Unlike the physical book library, network access to information retrieval or delivery is always available to authorized users, regardless of physical locations of the information or the people. Our main concern as end users now, is to selectively manage our time and technology filtering tools to limit information access only to what we really want or need at any given point in time.

Automated Transactions

As information becomes more accessible online, automated (self-service) business processes that are dependent upon such information are also becoming accessible to users responsible for the accuracy of such information. Whether it is simple data entry or a transaction, business applications are the “gateways” to all online informational databases.

Business process transactions are also becoming more automated, i.e., “self-service,” as web-based online application portals, both within the enterprise and between enterprise partners, and with consumers (customers). The main differentiators are the rights that different users have to both the application processes, as well as the specific data items controlled by the applications. Internal users, outside partners, and customers will obviously all have different access rights to shared information and application processes.

The New and Bigger Challenge – Initiating Contacts With People Through Search

As discussed in defining “Rosenberg’s Third Law,” the increased accessibility to information and even automated applications on the Web, has resulted in a corresponding increase in making business contacts with people. Even though self-service applications enable end users/customers to transact various business activities with automated business process applications online and by telephone, there are always situations where real-time human interaction is required to describe problems, answer questions, approve changes, finalize decisions, and coordinate/confirm follow-up corrective actions. Such person-to-person communication is still the heart of effective business operations.

However, initiating and receiving business contacts with people are very dependent on different working relationships, which include:

· Business unit management - business unit staff

· Customer – Customer support staff

· Customer – Sales staff

· Intra-enterprise group – inter-enterprise partners

· Known contacts – unknown contacts

Personalized information delivery from business applications are also dependent upon efficiently contacting people, ranging from simply sending an email to a mailbox to delivering time-sensitive information to a customer’s mobile device.

As enterprise activities become more geographically distributed, and communications become more mobile and “virtual,” business contacts will become less dependent on knowing the physical location of a specific person, the spelling of their name, or the communication device address and status (e.g., phone number, email address).

Business Processes: “It’s Not Who You Know, But Who Is Available and How”

A key differentiator between business and personal consumer communications is the ability to maintain real-time “business continuity” at all times. That means not only insuring that information access and communication channels are always functional, but also that people responsibilities can also be backed up in the event that a particular individual is not available for a significant period of time.

Interactions with customers, who don’t typically know any specific person to provide assistance, have always been supported both in physical brick and mortar environments, as well as in traditional call centers. For technology support within the enterprise, the telephone “Help Desk” has also been a familiar fixture. As business communications become more flexible and multimodal, the ability for enterprise personnel to contact people for workflow activities has increased, to make people contact more efficient, regardless of location.

Business communications technology is transitioning from requiring that a contact initiator know the device “address” of a specific person to knowing just a name or any associated descriptor to qualify the responsibilities/skills of any member of a group. This applies to address books, document links, stored messages, contact logs, etc. With presence and availability/modality management and new presence-based “dashboards”, a contact initiator can also dynamically “search” for the modality of contact accessibility for a specific name or for any available person in a group that qualifies for their contact needs.

Even if a contact recipient is “busy” talking on a phone or is in a situation where talking is inappropriate, other real-time contact alternatives for the contact initiator include:

· Simple IM text message exchange multitasking with the phone call. Good for existing “buddies.”

· Visual Call notification (like traditional call waiting) but without disrupting the phone conversation, which would identify the caller and subject of the call textually. Good for “non-buddies.”

· Urgent message notification (text, voice) in the event that the call initiator doesn’t want to interrupt the recipient, but leaves an important “one-way” message, e.g., email, voice mail, SMS. Good for any caller, especially someone with transmodal device capabilities.

· Setting up a future automated call return/conference call that coordinates the availability of all parties “as soon as possible” and would identify the initiator and the purpose of the contact. Good for “buddies” who are authorized to schedule such future arrangements and for multi-party conferencing.

(See my executive interview with OnState’s “Pending Communications”)

What Are the Benefits of “Searching” for People and Communication Modalities?

The ability for a user to quickly find the right, available person for their business needs certainly contributes to their individual time productivity, or what we have labeled as “micro-productivity.” However, being able to negotiate an immediate contact or one that is “as soon as possible” will also contribute towards reducing the “human latency” in business processes, which we consider having much more value to the enterprise and we call “macro-productivity.”

Using natural language search technologies, either textual or through speech recognition, simplifies the user interface for micro-productivity because they don’t have to know specific phone numbers or even names. It also simplifies the development of business information applications that will be increasingly linked to contact initiation with people for live assistance.

Although personal relationships with business contacts will always be important, both within an enterprise organization and across enterprises, critical, time-sensitive business processes have to be supported by multiple people resources, whether it is to get an answer, authorize a change, make a decision, or deliver a fix. Getting in touch with the right people in a timely way can’t be dependent on just the information in your personal address book or the communication devices you can use!

Some Implications for Telephony Systems

The migration from traditional wired telephony systems to mobile and IP-based, converged communications means that first and foremost that people are no longer “location-based” to make contact. The traditional “dial-plan” is going to be obsolete when you have an address book and name directories. With presence management and multimodal interfaces, the modality of contact with a person will depend dynamically on circumstances and user needs, not necessarily on how the contact is initiated (“transmodal” communications). The focus on the telephone number pad will shift to alphanumeric interface, which is more flexible for dealing with both information and people.

At the desktop, business phones will be changing their interfaces to support voice call-centric job responsibilities that vary from contact initiations (e.g., sales) to contact reception (customer support), along with the flexibility to be multimodal and transmodal. Desk phones will range from pure PC-based softphones to the next generation “hard phones,” such as Avaya’s recently announced one-X series of desk phones, which provide customizable, application-controlled screen interfaces and support “extension to cellular” functionality when users leave their office.

For mobile users, communication devices and mobile services need to be even more multimodal and personalized and the responsibility of the individual end users, even though the enterprise will reimburse them for business usage and control access to secure business information. These are the kind of changes enterprises should be preparing for in their migration planning.

What Do You Think?

Will need-oriented, rather than individual-oriented, business contacts become more effective in getting business processes to be more efficient? Will it be difficult to manage such kinds of contact information, or will end users still have to have their own private contact lists? Will presence-based multimodal contacts change the etiquette of phone calls, as well as impact the use of traditional telephony technologies of auto-attendants, call-waiting, call forwarding, and voice messaging (telephone answering)?

Let us know your opinion by sending us an email at artr@ix.netcom.com, or by commenting to our blog.

Customer Voice Contacts: Smarter Call Center IP Telephony Routing

While IP telephony and VoIP will make it easier and cheaper to handle calls from customers, I put the spotlight in this exclusive article on the most important function that IVR technology brings to all customer telephone contacts – “intelligent” call routing. Often perceived as just a means of automating specific business process tasks though self-service applications over the phone, using IVR technologies to find out why the customer is calling is really the first critical step to more efficient caller care and customer satisfaction.

Stop Guessing! The Five Real Reasons For Migrating Your Call Center to IP

Earlier, I wrote an article that “takes it from the top” and identifies the five main management reasons for an enterprise to move their call center operations to a multi-channel IP telecommunications infrastructure. Once you have aligned such business priorities properly, you can move on to the new implementation choices you now have in the “how to” phase for moving forward intelligently and cost efficiently.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

The Third Business Communication Paradigm Shift – Using Search Technology to Contact People

Copyright © 2006 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Business communication activity is comprised of three main elements from a user perspective - information access, business process transactions, and initiating (and receiving) contacts with people. The Internet and World Wide Web are changing how all three are being done.

Information Search

By now, everyone knows how dramatically the World Wide Web has impacted access to all kinds of information; it’s like living in a giant “virtual” library. Combined with the power of natural language text search tools, we can easily find all kinds of documents, including personal information and messages stored on our own private PCs. We can also get information notification dynamically delivered by email through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology as soon as it becomes “published” on a web site. Finally, people and automated processes that have our email address can send us information ranging from unwanted “spam” to important, time sensitive information.

Unlike the physical book library, network access to information retrieval or delivery is always available to authorized users, regardless of physical locations of the information or the people. Our main concern as end users now, is to selectively manage our time and technology filtering tools to limit information access only to what we really want or need at any given point in time.

Automated Transactions

As information becomes more accessible online, automated (self-service) business processes that are dependent upon such information are also becoming accessible to users responsible for the accuracy of such information. Whether it is simple data entry or a transaction, business applications are the “gateways” to all online informational databases.

Business process transactions are also becoming more automated, i.e., “self-service,” as web-based online application portals, both within the enterprise and between enterprise partners, and with consumers (customers). The main differentiators are the rights that different users have to both the application processes, as well as the specific data items controlled by the applications. Internal users, outside partners, and customers will obviously all have different access rights to shared information and application processes.

The New and Bigger Challenge – Initiating Contacts With People Through Search

As discussed in defining “Rosenberg’s Third Law,” the increased accessibility to information and even automated applications on the Web, has resulted in a corresponding increase in making business contacts with people. Even though self-service applications enable end users/customers to transact various business activities with automated business process applications online and by telephone, there are always situations where real-time human interaction is required to describe problems, answer questions, approve changes, finalize decisions, and coordinate/confirm follow-up corrective actions. Such person-to-person communication is still the heart of effective business operations.

However, initiating and receiving business contacts with people are very dependent on different working relationships, which include:

· Business unit management - business unit staff

· Customer – Customer support staff

· Customer – Sales staff

· Intra-enterprise group – inter-enterprise partners

· Known contacts – unknown contacts

Personalized information delivery from business applications are also dependent upon efficiently contacting people, ranging from simply sending an email to a mailbox to delivering time-sensitive information to a customer’s mobile device.

As enterprise activities become more geographically distributed, and communications become more mobile and “virtual,” business contacts will become less dependent on knowing the physical location of a specific person, the spelling of their name, or the communication device address and status (e.g., phone number, email address).

Business Processes: “It’s Not Who You Know, But Who Is Available and How”

A key differentiator between business and personal consumer communications is the ability to maintain real-time “business continuity” at all times. That means not only insuring that information access and communication channels are always functional, but also that people responsibilities can also be backed up in the event that a particular individual is not available for a significant period of time.

Interactions with customers, who don’t typically know any specific person to provide assistance, have always been supported both in physical brick and mortar environments, as well as in traditional call centers. For technology support within the enterprise, the telephone “Help Desk” has also been a familiar fixture. As business communications become more flexible and multimodal, the ability for enterprise personnel to contact people for workflow activities has increased, to make people contact more efficient, regardless of location.

Business communications technology is transitioning from requiring that a contact initiator know the device “address” of a specific person to knowing just a name or any associated descriptor to qualify the responsibilities/skills of any member of a group. This applies to address books, document links, stored messages, contact logs, etc. With presence and availability/modality management and new presence-based “dashboards”, a contact initiator can also dynamically “search” for the modality of contact accessibility for a specific name or for any available person in a group that qualifies for their contact needs.

Even if a contact recipient is “busy” talking on a phone or is in a situation where talking is inappropriate, other real-time contact alternatives for the contact initiator include:

· Simple IM text message exchange multitasking with the phone call. Good for existing “buddies.”

· Visual Call notification (like traditional call waiting) but without disrupting the phone conversation, which would identify the caller and subject of the call textually. Good for “non-buddies.”

· Urgent message notification (text, voice) in the event that the call initiator doesn’t want to interrupt the recipient, but leaves an important “one-way” message, e.g., email, voice mail, SMS. Good for any caller, especially someone with transmodal device capabilities.

· Setting up a future automated call return/conference call that coordinates the availability of all parties “as soon as possible” and would identify the initiator and the purpose of the contact. Good for “buddies” who are authorized to schedule such future arrangements and for multi-party conferencing.

(See my executive interview with OnState’s “Pending Communications”)

What Are the Benefits of “Searching” for People and Communication Modalities?

The ability for a user to quickly find the right, available person for their business needs certainly contributes to their individual time productivity, or what we have labeled as “micro-productivity.” However, being able to negotiate an immediate contact or one that is “as soon as possible” will also contribute towards reducing the “human latency” in business processes, which we consider having much more value to the enterprise and we call “macro-productivity.”

Using natural language search technologies, either textual or through speech recognition, simplifies the user interface for micro-productivity because they don’t have to know specific phone numbers or even names. It also simplifies the development of business information applications that will be increasingly linked to contact initiation with people for live assistance.

Although personal relationships with business contacts will always be important, both within an enterprise organization and across enterprises, critical, time-sensitive business processes have to be supported by multiple people resources, whether it is to get an answer, authorize a change, make a decision, or deliver a fix. Getting in touch with the right people in a timely way can’t be dependent on just the information in your personal address book or the communication devices you can use!

Some Implications for Telephony Systems

The migration from traditional wired telephony systems to mobile and IP-based, converged communications means that first and foremost that people are no longer “location-based” to make contact. The traditional “dial-plan” is going to be obsolete when you have an address book and name directories. With presence management and multimodal interfaces, the modality of contact with a person will depend dynamically on circumstances and user needs, not necessarily on how the contact is initiated (“transmodal” communications). The focus on the telephone number pad will shift to alphanumeric interface, which is more flexible for dealing with both information and people.

At the desktop, business phones will be changing their interfaces to support voice call-centric job responsibilities that vary from contact initiations (e.g., sales) to contact reception (customer support), along with the flexibility to be multimodal and transmodal. Desk phones will range from pure PC-based softphones to the next generation “hard phones,” such as Avaya’s recently announced one-X series of desk phones, which provide customizable, application-controlled screen interfaces and support “extension to cellular” functionality when users leave their office.

For mobile users, communication devices and mobile services need to be even more multimodal and personalized and the responsibility of the individual end users, even though the enterprise will reimburse them for business usage and control access to secure business information. These are the kind of changes enterprises should be preparing for in their migration planning.

What Do You Think?

Will need-oriented, rather than individual-oriented, business contacts become more effective in getting business processes to be more efficient? Will it be difficult to manage such kinds of contact information, or will end users still have to have their own private contact lists? Will presence-based multimodal contacts change the etiquette of phone calls, as well as impact the use of traditional telephony technologies of auto-attendants, call-waiting, call forwarding, and voice messaging (telephone answering)?

Let us know your opinion by sending us an email at artr@ix.netcom.com, or by commenting to our blog.

Customer Voice Contacts: Smarter Call Center IP Telephony Routing

While IP telephony and VoIP will make it easier and cheaper to handle calls from customers, I put the spotlight in this exclusive article on the most important function that IVR technology brings to all customer telephone contacts – “intelligent” call routing. Often perceived as just a means of automating specific business process tasks though self-service applications over the phone, using IVR technologies to find out why the customer is calling is really the first critical step to more efficient caller care and customer satisfaction.

Stop Guessing! The Five Real Reasons For Migrating Your Call Center to IP

Earlier, I wrote an article that “takes it from the top” and identifies the five main management reasons for an enterprise to move their call center operations to a multi-channel IP telecommunications infrastructure. Once you have aligned such business priorities properly, you can move on to the new implementation choices you now have in the “how to” phase for moving forward intelligently and cost efficiently.

Friday, June 02, 2006

More Than Just Multimedia – The Modalities of Converged IP Communication

Copyright (c) 2006, Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

With the migration of telephony to IP, business communications are converging at all levels:

· Network transport

· Communication and business process application servers

· Endpoint application software clients

· Endpoint device interfaces

The technology silos that separated different media of person-to-person contacts are merging, so that users can exploit any and all forms of communication as circumstances and needs dictate. That has always been the holy grail of unified communications technologies, to provide greater user flexibility, efficiencies, and productivity in business operations.

The proprietary telephony industry is going through the disruptive pain of changing its technologies to converge voice communications with standards-based information and text communication software that is exploiting the power and flexibility of Internet and IP networking. Not only are there new players in the IP telephony game, but also the big information application providers like IBM and Microsoft are now able to play the telephone game. Compatibility and interoperability is good, but doesn’t tell us where business communications convergence is taking the end users.

Communication Modalities

While some people initially only looked at the convergence and interoperability of the media of person-to-person communications, i.e., text vs. voice vs. video, it was obvious that there were other usage parameters for such communications, including:

· Real-time contacts vs. asynchronous messaging

· Business contacts vs. personal/consumer contacts

· Wired vs. wireless device connectivity

· Handheld vs. desktop device form factors

· Enterprise-owned technology vs. hosted services vs. public services

I consider all of these as “modalities” of communication that can impact the ability for people to communicate with each other anywhere and any time. Because IP communications, including VoIP and IP telephony, are moving to still evolving, standards-based SIP, we will be able to bridge any kind of endpoint and contact modality across different networks and across enterprise systems. Most importantly, SIP-enabled, federated presence management, combined with multi-modal devices, will enable individual users to intelligently, efficiently, and dynamically control their converged communication activities to fit the changing priorities of their job and personal responsibilities to others. So, how do we describe such new flexibility and how will we use it effectively?

Converging Messaging, Calls, and Conferencing - Crossmodal and Transmodal Communications

Because we are entering a new world of communications convergence that will increasingly exploit wireless mobility and multimodal devices, we not only need to enable individual users to independently choose the modality of contact most appropriate for their individual needs, but also consider the flexibility of dynamically changing between communication modalities during the course of the contact.

The two key multimodal usage options are:

· Crossmodal CommunicationThis enables one party to communicate in one medium or modality with a second party who uses another modality that is appropriate for their environment or the device they happen to have.

Examples include message conversion between text and voice, one party using a real-time speech interface, while the other uses a real-time text interface (IM), or one party on video, but the other party only on a voice connection.

· Transmodal Communication – In this case, communicating parties want to seamlessly “escalate” their initial mode of contact to one that is more real-time or to expand the contact group. Examples include moving from email or voice mail to Instant Messaging or to a voice or video connection, without losing the context of the current contact. In legacy voice mail systems, this feature was called “call return.” This capability can also include dynamically expanding the current contact connection to other users for “instant multi-party conferencing,” as well as enabling crossmodal participation as mentioned above.

Transmodal capabilities will be particularly important for time-sensitive group communications in organizations, especially as wireless mobility and IP networking accelerates the “virtual” enterprise and teleworking. It will also be become very useful for supporting the increasing use of Web self-service and telephone-oriented voice response applications for enterprise customers that will always require some form of live assistance.

For more thoughts on transmodal communications, read my original article on the subject.

Moving Multimodal IP Communications To The Users – SIP Endpoints

While the initial buzz of VoIP and IP telephony was focused on migrating to the network infrastructure for reducing costs, the market push has shifted to communication applications and their integration with business process. However, the flexibility and efficiencies of multimodal communications will not be fully realized until end users get their hands on communication devices that exploit the interoperability of the evolving Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard. It is really not enough to have an “all-in-one” device that supports text and voice communications as silos with separate connections, functions, and addressing. Convergence at the end user level, across modalities, is what will make IP communications fly, and that is where converged, handheld and desktop SIP-based endpoint devices come into play.

Device and modality independence will be the standard for business communications of the future, enterprise organizations will be challenged to support and manage such flexibility, particularly for wireless, handheld devices. The paradigm of the standardized wired desktop is transitioning to the software-based, personalized, job-oriented device that will work with any communication application, over all networks, and with any other user device, in any modality.

Putting It All Together

Converged communications will involve a lot of different software technologies from different developers that will interwork on standards-based platforms and devices. Such technologies will have to be available as both enterprise-owned applications well as through hosted services, in order for the vision of universal converged communications to be realized. The challenge for enterprise organizations is to find the right providers that will facilitate putting all the pieces together in any combination required at the moment for different groups of users and business applications.

Right now, the technology industry is readjusting itself to provide business communications as mobile, software-based, services to replace the traditional premise-based wired equipment (CPE) of traditional enterprise telephony, as well as the network infrastructure of the legacy PSTN. The battle for control over such software and provisioning of multimodal endpoint devices is starting to heat up and it remains to be seen what will happen to business “partnerships” being forged today in the name of convergence.

In the meantime, migration is going to be a slow and cautious journey for most enterprise organizations, as the technologies evolve and as consumers become more mobile and multimodal through IP communications. Don’t expect too many “best practices” soon, since there is a lot of learning to be done at the end user and business application levels. This is making the case for “hosted” and managed services very strong for migration.

What Do You Think?

Who will be supplying new, multi-modal devices to the enterprise? What controls will the enterprise have over such devices? What will enterprise IT responsibilities be like for deploying new hosted and managed communication services? How will traditional “CPE” change, as telephony applications become open software and endpoint device independent? How will IT determine traffic capacity requirements for crossmodal and transmodal activities? Who will be the “one-stop-shop” for converged enterprise communications? What will be key to a “graceful” enterprise migration to converged communications?

Who or what will drive enterprise migration to converged communications the most? Mobility? What changes will converged communications and multimodal devices require for enterprise end users in terms of enterprise usage policies, device support, and user training? How will the enterprise deal consistently with multimodal customers? Who in the enterprise and how will they provide the requirements and justifications for multimodal communications?

Customer Voice Contacts: Smarter Call Center IP Telephony Routing

While IP telephony and VoIP will make it easier and cheaper to handle calls from customers, I put the spotlight in this exclusive article on the most important function that IVR technology brings to all customer telephone contacts – “intelligent” call routing. Often perceived as just a means of automating specific business process tasks though self-service applications over the phone, using IVR technologies to find out why the customer is calling is really the first critical step to more efficient caller care and customer satisfaction.

Stop Guessing! The Five Real Reasons For Migrating Your Call Center to IP

Earlier, I wrote an article that “takes it from the top” and identifies the five main management reasons for an enterprise to move their call center operations to a multi-channel IP telecommunications infrastructure. Once you have aligned such business priorities properly, you can move on to the new implementation choices you now have in the “how to” phase for moving forward intelligently and cost efficiently.

Art Rosenberg

Copyright (c) 2006, Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide