By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies
Expert
At Micrsoft’s
recent Lync conference, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft’s new head of Lync
and Skype, came up with yet another
term for what those two product offerings will do for business communications,
i.e., “Universal Communications.” It doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement
over what we at UC Strategies have been
calling “Unified Communications” (UC). After all, what is the big difference
between “unified” and “universal?” My feeling is that either term is acceptable,
but the real problem is that people think “communications” means it is only
about person-to-person contacts.
If you look up
the definition of “communications”
in Wikipedia, you will find that “communications” is limited to contacts
between people.
Communication
(from Latin commūnicāre, meaning "to share" [1]) is
the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts, messages,
or information, as by speech, visuals, signals, written, or behavior. It is the
meaningful exchange of information between two or more living creatures.
True, it used
to be that, before interactive computing, the only way a business transaction
could be performed or business information could be accessed remotely was
through a live person (telephone, mail), but that has really changed with
direct consumer access to online applications through multi-modal smartphones
and tablets. Rather than just person-to-person contacts, users can now get or
give information by interacting with online applications, and, vice versa,
people can receive alerts, reminders, and timely notifications from automated
applications (CEBP). So, “communications,” as commonly defined being just
between people, is really not adequate for what is actually happening in
computer-based business activities.
Time To Upgrade “Communications” To “Interactions”
Don’t get me
wrong! We still need person-to-person contacts, but now we need to include
contacts between a person and an automated application. The way I see it, both
types of contacts may be considered as interactions – interactions between
people or between a person and an automated application. In addition, either
type of interaction can be two-way, i.e., a person or application contacts you
or you contact a person or an application. Since there are many efficiency
benefits to be gained by minimizing the need for involving another person in
accessing/delivering information, or performing a routine transaction, that
choice should now become a flexible option of any self-service application.
If we now look
at what we are “unifying,” “optimizing,” or “universalizing,” it’s not the old
definition of “communications,” but rather any interaction with people or with
automated online applications. What is also most important, is that the
flexibility to dynamically choose the mode of interaction is now practical with
increasing end user adoption of BYOD multimodal mobile devices that can support
all the mobile user’s situational needs. Further, when one user wants to talk
but the the user can’t hear, or one user want to type text but the othe user
can’t look (e.g., driving a car) speech–to-text and text-to speech conversions
can be brought into play for contact exchanges.
“Unified Interactions” (UI) Hits The User Interfaces On The
Head
As BYOD takes
hold with multinodal mobile device use by all kinds of end users, the
flexibility for more efficiently exchanging information and conversation in
different modes becomes more practical. Now we are hearing a lot more about the
“User Experience,” which really depends on the User Interface (UI) with both
person-to-person contacts and interactions with online applications that are
rapidly becoming more mobile than just restricted to desktops devices.
What “Unified”
means is that the different modes can be dynamically used by people involved
with any form of interaction with other people or with an automated application
process (inbound or outbound). In a real-time videoconference session, some
people can be “on camera” with video, while others can only see the “video,”
but still participate in the voice conversation; all participants may also be
able to see any form of information that is exchanged (document, messages,
video clips, etc.) If you want to call that “Universal,” fine, but I think the
real focus should be on whether interactions will be just between people or
between both people and online applications.
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