By Art
Rosenberg, The Unified-View/
UC
Strategies Expert
The PSTN is
still actively in use but Mobile UC and the Internet is slowly but surely
changing the way we work and do business, especially the role of telephony. In
addition to enabling business users to dynamically make contact and exchange
information in a variety of modes (real-time voice/video, chat, asynchronous
messaging, social messaging, automated notifications, etc.) with a single,
multimodal, mobile device, they also benefit from having direct access to
information, online business applications, and having “contextual” information
relating to the people they contact and the subject matter they have been
communicating about. The PSTN cannot do all of this, but it will be around for
a while to support legacy telephony users.
The increased
use of the Internet for both information access and contacts with people means
that business activities will become more time-efficient because of the
increased flexibility and accessibility of all types of end users involved in
business process performance. This, in turn, will require all organizations to
be more responsive to day-to-day operational situations and to support a
variety of individual end user communication needs.
Although
multimodal mobile devices are enabling real-time voice and video connections between
people to include the exchange of information (messages, documents, video
clips, etc.) during a voice or video conversation, mobile users may not
necessarily be immediately available for a real-time connection, thus requiring
the use of multimedia messaging options (voice, video, text).
Key Mobile UC Trends
1. The choice of mobile devices for both
business and personal use is increasingly becoming the responsibility of the
individual end users, better known as “Bring Your Own Device” or BYOD.
End users will
choose the mobile devices they prefer to use for all their communication
contacts, whether job-related, business-related, or personal and social.
Business organizations must support their end users’ desire to carry a single
mobile device that can securely accommodate all their mobile contacts and
interactions. That will require that such mobile devices are able to securely
separate access to job-related connections from personal connections, where the
job-related connections are fully controllable by the organization.
The multimodal
mobile devices will also facilitate the user’s ability to dynamically change
from one mode of communication to another, e.g., from a message to an IM text
chat to a voice or video call, to a group conference connection, while still
retaining access to the same “contextual” information about all interactions.
2. Multimodal mobile devices enable all modes
of end user contacts with people and notifications from automated business
applications.
Smartphones
and tablets are not limited to just person-to-person communications, but are
also practical for receiving timely notifications from authorized business
process applications. The latter can also provide a convenient way for
recipients to respond to a notification by providing a connection to a person,
a service provider’s staff, or a link to a self-service application.
3. Mobile access to people and applications is
best provided through “cloud” connectivity for interoperability and
integrations.
Because mobile
users may be located wirelessly anywhere, and require flexible choices in how
they can communicate with others, it is most practical to provide such services
through wireless IP networks that are not dependent on legacy premise-based
servers. “Cloud” services, whether hosted, private, managed, or hybrids, offer
the flexibility of mobile access as well as centralized points of integration
that can support a variety of different end user needs anywhere, anytime, any
way.
Such mobile
flexibility will change the way people access information (e.g., check their
bank accounts), perform direct online transactions (e.g., make payments),
initiate flexible text/voice/video contacts with other people (e.g.,
“click-to-connect” contextually from a document, message, web site), attend
online school courses, take tests, and interact with teachers at all levels of
education, make health care more efficient and timely through mobile monitoring
devices, notifications, and video conferencing.
4. Personalized, contextual information (data)
can be exploited in “cloud” storage for greater access by mobile devices and
mobile applications.
The “clouds”
are not only practical for providing access to mobile applications, but also
provide storage for contextual information about individual users and their
online activities. Such contextual data is not only useful for applications to
personalize interactions with end users, but will also provide more contextual
information to a contact recipient than traditional “caller ID” data. This can
include mobile user location information and availability (federated presence).
With
personalized contextual data stored in “cloud”-based applications, mobile
devices can now become virtual personal assistants that can dynamically and
automatically provide practical information to an end user, whenever an online
application is invoked, or whenever the user’s physical location detected by
the network triggers the need for information exchange.
5. Millennial users expect “always on”
connectivity and flexible and dynamic control over inbound and outbound
communications with people.
Younger
generation users are accustomed to communicating from anywhere with smartphones
or tablets, as well as through wearable devices (smart watches, glasses) in
their modality of choice. In particular, they can be multi-tasking by texting
or talking with others, while looking up or exchanging information.
Using texting
instead of voice conversation will be particularly important to mobile users
who want to maintain maximum privacy for their communications in public places,
when the environment is too noisy, or when speaking would be disruptive to
their current activity (e.g., sitting in a meeting). In addition, such users
will want any voice messages automatically transcribed to text for faster
retrieval.
With mobile UC
and a multimodal mobile device, users will always be able to escalate their
mode of person-to-person communication from any form of messaging to a
real-time voice or video connection, while also accessing information and
performing online transactions.
Bottom Line
Every
organization must be prepared to support their different types of end users
with all forms of communication contact that will also be contextually
integrated with information. This need will be driven by user mobile BYOD, as
well as in the interests of increasing business process performance efficiency
and reducing both operational and technology costs.
The big
challenge will be how to migrate easily and cost effectively from a variety of
legacy telephony communications and messaging technologies to the multimodal,
“mobile first” future of business interactions between people and business
process applications in the “clouds.” Technology providers who have long
specialized in supporting telephony integrations and interoperability, such as AVST, will be best equipped to combine the
new demands of mobile UC with existing telephony functions such as
auto-attendants and voice mail.
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Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
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