Unified-View

Where Is "Unified Communications" Really Going?

2012-01-24T15:55:00.002-05:00

Unified Communications – Then and Now

January 24, 2012 // Ed LaBanca

An interview with Art Rosenberg of the Unified-View

Art Rosenberg

After seeing numerous posts about Unified Communications (UC) in the media and business / social networks where professionals were addressing UC or trying to describe what it is, I decided to give Art Rosenberg a call. This article includes his initial reply and follow-on interview questions and answers.

Art: I’m not surprised by the confusion that “unified communications” is causing, since there are several perspectives that drive the concept. I have started to use the term “UC-enabled” to describe all applications and infrastructure elements that interact with a person, especially when they are mobile and using multi-modal devices. UC is not a product or even a single service, but a means towards device, network, and application interoperability in communicating with anyone, anywhere, any time, any way.

So, legacy communication technologies can be extended to become “UC-enabled” and the traditional technology specialists and VARs can also extend their expertise to help plan and implement UC-enabled applications.

Such implementations can include traditional on-premise products and/or hosted, cloud-based services.

“I have started to use the term ‘UC-enabled’ to describe all applications and infrastructure elements that interact with a person, especially when they are mobile and using multi-modal devices.”

Art Rosenberg

Ed: It is broadly understood that you originally came up with the term Unified Communication (UC) in the context of your company, The Unified-View, over a decade ago. The term has been embraced by virtually all vendors and professionals within the telecommunications industry and user communities. Could you provide some insight as to your understanding of UC when you first came up with the term?

Art: I originally got involved with business communications by pioneering voice messaging (voice mail) for traditional hosted telephone answering services. Telephone answering, handled by integrated business voicemail systems, enabled failed incoming telephone calls to automatically transfer the caller to record a voice message for the recipient’s voice mailbox (like a giant answering machine). Although company voicemail systems also allowed internal users to directly record, deposit and retrieve voice mail messages for their internal users, outside callers had to make the call connection attempt first to create a voice message.

“UC is not a product or even a single service, but a means towards device, network, and application interoperability in communicating with anyone, anywhere, any time, any way…”

Art Rosenberg

Voice mail technology expanded to “unified messaging” (UM), which enabled voicemail systems to interoperate with email systems for message storage and message management. However, the user interfaces for email and voicemail remained basically the same. Since voicemail systems did integrate with the telephone system, they allowed phone calls to become voice messages and voice messages to be responded to with an outbound call (“Call Return”). I wanted all types of messages to have that kind of flexibility.

So, back around 2000, I expanded “UM” to “unified communications” (UC) to be able to include asynchronous messaging, but also real time responses to a message. I also wanted to include all forms of messaging contact initiation (including fax) to a person (by a person or automated application), as well as all forms of reception/response by the message recipient. That would include “click-to-call/chat” options for responding to a message.

Ed: How did it unfold in ways you expected? How did it unfold in ways you didn’t expect?

Art: The big obstacle for UC implementation was getting proprietary hardware-based telephony to move into the world of software. IP Telephony or VoIP was the initial step forward in doing that, but was focused on reducing technology costs. What is finally starting to happen is the emphasis on business process performance that can be improved through more efficient and flexible means of contact and response with individual end users. The market is still in the process of gracefully migrating from TDM telephony to IP telephony, so there is still a need for supporting that shift through gateways and SIP trunking replacements. But the real benefit to business operations will come from UC-enabled applications that will benefit both individual end-user and business process productivity.

UC started to take hold in business organizations for internal users only. However, there was no real incentive for desktop users (information workers) to want the flexibility of UC. At first, desktop “softphones” looked liked the way to go, but the real driver for UC adoption was mobility and the adoption of multimodal “smartphones” (now tablets too). This brought person-to-person contacts together with automated business process “notifications” and interactive “mobile apps” for Internet information access and delivery. I had always suggested that mobile users would be the chief beneficiaries of UC-enabled applications of all kinds. So, when Apple announced its first iPhone, I wrote that the “UC Phone” had arrived, and with the iPhone 4S and Siri voice assistant, that UC vision is “getting meat on its bones.”

One big surprise has been the revolution in social networking services, which basically uses short text messaging to communicate and post personal status and opinion information on the Web for others to see and respond to. It is not really just “person-to-person” messaging but, because it is quickly and easily posted, it ties in well with UC’s big driver, mobile devices that enable originators to post and interested recipients to be quickly notified and respond to whatever the subject is. End users are rapidly exploiting this form of contact and information exchange for business contacts, which also lends itself to further UC flexibility in switching to other forms of communication (“click-to-contact”) and federated presence information on availability for ad hoc calls and conferencing.

Although the concept was not new, the shift to IP connectivity opened the door to putting people connectivity and information into the “cloud.” This trend is rapidly being adopted by both small and large businesses as they migrate from their legacy premise-based technologies. In effect, mobility and UC enablement of all types of software applications will best be served by being “virtual” and in public or private clouds. Security and privacy issues, of course, must be handled properly, but physical location of servers should not affect manageability.

Voice mail systems remained tied to proprietary Touch-Tone telephone systems and their Telephone User Interfaces (TUI) and independent companies like Octel and more lately, AVST, specialized in integrating their voice mail system offerings to many popular telephone systems. This was particularly useful for distributed branch locations where different telephone systems were in place. They also tied in TUI-based IVR applications as a logical self-service offering. However, the combination of UC flexibility, mobile devices, and accurate speech recognition technology, will change the role of IVR to combine optional visual screen output along and voice/finger input (IVVR). This will bring the personalized mobile smartphone into the domain of the PC.

Ed: How do you view UC now? Are there any differences such as context in today’s architectures and people’s perception?

Art: One big thing that is slowly changing is how blind, ad hoc real-time contacts (telephone calls) will be displaced by “contextual intelligence.” That is, a real-time contact will be initiated within the context of the caller’s purpose for making a call and also with “availability” (presence information) about the person to be contacted. The caller no longer will have to know location-based phone numbers, nor will they have to make a phone call just to end up in “voicemail jail.”

Instead, callers will start using contact center technology for getting to the right person associated with the context of the issue they need to discuss. However, with CEBP (Communication Enabled Business Process) applications, they can start with either the information issue or the specific person (directory) to contact before a call connection is attempted. Obviously, if there is no urgent need for an immediate connection, any form of messaging will do. I see this approach being taken for contacts from any type of end user.

Call center technology exploited the use of both voice and text messaging with customers, but was not hugely successful because most consumers used telephones, not computers, and agents could not efficiently switch modes of interaction dynamically. However, the call center was the model for the “contact center,” which was supposed to exploit inbound and outbound messaging tied to “availability” (presence) of qualified agents or experts.

To the extent that consumers are rapidly becoming more mobile and multi-modal, and that staff personnel are working remotely or are mobile, the future of the UC-enabled contact center (“UC Contact Center”) will expand to cover everyone in an organization in different ways (e.g., the “Help Desk, “Nurse Call,”etc.). Even more change will come from the universal growth of public social networking capabilities to people and information.

Ed: Can you help clarify what UC is today in your view looking at it from various perspectives:

- Users?

Art: End users don’t know what “UC” is or really care. All they see is the multi-modal user interface (UI) for a variety of computer-based applications, which has to be simple, non-error-prone, and fast. They don’t need to know if the application is in their device or in the “cloud.” Unfortunately there is no good name for consumers to describe UC flexibility, but they know what it lets them do when they use their smartphones for initiating or responding to different types of contacts. “Mobile Apps” that exploit smartphone flexibility is probably the closest label that consumers will recognize. So, they will want to be able to use “mobile apps!”

- Enterprise executives?

Art: There are several different levels of executives, but the ones that are responsible for business operational performance are the number one target for exploiting the benefits of UC-enabled business processes. They are the ones that need to identify the existing business processes that can be improved with specific UC-enabled applications. They also have to identify “who” will be the end users involved in the business process, whether they are inside the organization or not. Finally, they are the ones who can help prioritize UC implementation planning.

IT management can contribute to the above by evaluating the different implementation alternatives, providing tools to evaluate the performance of business processes (current and future), and for recommendations for choosing technology providers.

- Vendors / Value-added Resellers?

Art: The vendors have to realize they can’t “lock” in UC-enabled applications the way the old telephony did. End users, both inside and outside the organization will be using mobile smartphones of their choice (BYOD) and will choosing different modalities of contact and information access, depending on their situational circumstances. So, they all have to be “open” when it comes to interoperability of their software and network connectivity.

The situation with Value-added Resellers (VARs) is also going change because of the shift to application-based software that has to flexibly accommodate different mobile User Interface needs. They have to change their business model from big hardware purchase commissions to ongoing service subscription revenues. They also have to be able to work together with application specialists in various vertical markets as part of a team that will include independent consultants and different software/hardware vendors. Finally, they need to provide the analytic tools and metrics for evaluating application performance and trialing new customized self-service apps.

Since “VARs” will be shifting to selling and supporting hosted services for a variety of UC-enabled applications, I have labeled them as “UC VARs.”

- Consultants?

Art: Consultants will continue to play a strong role, especially with larger organizations that may need a strategic plan for migrating to UC-enabled applications. They will need to be able to identify the mission-critical business processes and associated communication problems that require UC-enabled applications to be customized. They will help select appropriate “UC VARs” that can fulfill a client organization’s UC migration needs.

However, big technology providers like Avaya and IBM have already started using their strength in the marketplace to offer consultative services for evaluating and managing business process requirements for UC-enabled applications.

- The media?

Art: The media is slowly getting to understand how UC-enabled applications are replacing the old siloed communication products and services. They have tried to come with new labels to describe what “UC” is all about, including lumping “collaboration” as part of UC. I simply call such functionality as “UC-enabled Collaboration.” The basic business processes for collaboration include meetings and multimedia conferencing, which have a number of associated applications to support them, e.g., planning, notifications, distribution of relevant information, etc.

The media still focuses heavily on ad hoc, real-time person-to-person contacts and is slowly understanding how automated business process applications can also exploit Mobile UC via outbound notifications and responses.

Ed: What are your thoughts on enterprise adaption?

Art: It is going to be slow because it requires a lot of change and a lot of preparation by user organizations that just don’t have the experience or financial resources to move forward very quickly. In addition, the technology providers aren’t finished yet with their product or service offerings. It is also going slowly because it is not clear who is in charge of migrating to UC-enabled applications, business managers or IT. So, it will be a slow evolution.

I believe that accommodating the newer modalities of communication, e.g., Mobile UC and Social Networking, coupled with expanded contact center operations, should be the first targets for UC-enabled applications. This will be particularly important for UC-enabled self-service applications to replace legacy IVR applications, as well as for automated proactive, outbound notifications (CEBP).

Smaller organizations will be able to move more quickly by going for hosted, “cloud” services. The larger organizations will be more cautious because of their existing technology investments, their IT staff responsibilities, and security/privacy concerns. However, larger organizations will start to use “cloud” solutions (public or private) as a starting point for the new modalities of UC-enabled applications, particularly for social networking.

Ed: How do you see UC in today’s context going forward?

Art: The emphasis must be on the “UC-enabled” applications, not just “UC, ”i.e., automated business process applications and communication applications. These applications can all be independent software applications, but now must be multi-modal, “open,” and inter-operable to support UC flexibility. Access to each type of application should be simple, flexible, and fast, and the user interfaces have to be multi-modal to accommodate user choice with mobile, multimodal smartphones and tablets. Analytic tools must be also available to track all application activity from a usage and performance perspective, which will vary by type of user involved (customer, agent, expert, field sales, field support, business partner, etc.).

Analytics will play an even more important role in evaluating communications content (what end users do and say) that will be accessible from “public” and “private” social networking activities not protected by privacy features. Such analytic information will be necessary on an ongoing basis in order to manage the dynamic activity changes that will constantly take place at both the business process level and the communication level.

For more information related to this article or regarding UC vendor solutions contact: elabanca@collabtel.com. Your comments, questions and ideas are welcome. CollabTel (formerly CollabGen) provides consulting services for vendors / VAR’s, and end-user enterprises (www.CollabTel.com). Analyst reports are available via www.CXOReports.com.

IBM's "Social Business" Needs To Be "UC-enabled"

2012-01-22T14:42:00.004-05:00

It’s all about branding new business communications technology in order to associate new products and, more importantly, new services in the marketplace. The trick is in the definitions of the brand and catching the interest of who in a business organization will be interested and responsible for new business communications capabilities. This is particularly tricky as both business processes and communications with people converge as software that all can exploit the Web as services.

The biggest target used to be telephony for real-time person-to-person contacts, but as more consumers started using screen-based endpoint devices, text messaging communications (email, IM, and mobile SMS) have rapidly become a practical alternative to real-time voice interfaces and connections. This shift was accelerated with the advent of multi-modal smartphones and tablets that not only make individual end users more accessible for both business and personal contacts, but also support “UC-enabled” applications to exploit voice or visual user interfaces.

Since Microsoft came in to the UC game at the desktop and mobile smartphones with its Lync software products, IBM has now jumped into the marketplace with a new brand, “Social Business,” that is intended to include US-enabled applications of all kinds. At their recent Lotusphere conference, IBM upgraded their older enterprise technologies to be part of their “Smart Cloud” and “Social Business” product and service offerings. In particular, they reinforced their role in consultative services to organizations that need help in identifying requirements and managing the migration to what I call “UC-enabled” applications.

One analyst who attended the Lotusphere conference was very impressed with the new directions of IBM, but never mentioned “UC” as part of his review (Bruce Guptill, Saugatuck research Alert). On the other hand, Irwin Lazar, from Nemertes, highlighted the need for “UC Management” in his No Jitter review of the Lotusphere conference. (See http://www.nojitter.com/post/232400454/inside-lotusphere)

“UC” is not going away but is being embedded under new labels for business communications. As mobile computer applications proliferate, they need the flexibility of UC for interoperability and, perhaps more importantly, the end user "experience" for multimedia User Interfaces. As far as I am concerned, “Social Business” is really another form of communications that has to become “UC-enabled!”

Apple Will Make Smartphones Even Smarter

2011-12-31T18:37:00.002-05:00

For my last post of the year, I want to highlight something else that Apple is bringing to the Mobile UC table. They have been notably successful in innovating the design of mobile devices (iPhone, iPad) and it looks like they are converging the user interface modalities even further with their latest patent announcement of the “Smart Bezel” and its Multi-Modal Human Interface (MMHI) Engine.

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/12/apples-revolutionary-smart-bezel-project-gains-a-new-chapter.html

As long as I have been writing about the multi-modal benefits of UC for mobile end users, I have been suggesting that contact initiators should be able to dynamically choose their modality of communication independently of what their recipients may want. That will be particularly valuable for all forms of messaging, where both message input and output (retrieval) could be voice or visual. It will also be very useful for “mobile apps” where input commands can exploit the convenience of voice, while output responses (menu choices, information, graphics, etc.) can exploit the screen. Such flexibility is what UC is all about from the practical end user perspective because it makes the mobile user not only more accessible but also more efficient/productive in using their time.

What is particularly interesting about the Apple approach is that it will simplify and dynamically automate any changes in user interface options based upon the individual end user’s environmental situation. This would be particularly important for dark vs. bright lighting conditions as they impact the use of the screen and its battery needs, as opposed to using speech or haptic input/output as much as possible.

We have always suggested that a person driving a car will require “hands-free” input and “eyes-free” output to insure safe driving. (We can always debate the issue of distractions of any kind for safe driving!) Apple’s Multi-Modal Human Interface Engine would be able to detect the fact that the movement of the mobile device indicates it is in a moving vehicle and could automatically invoke limited interface modality choices. Although there will always be an issue of whether the user is actually driving or is a passenger on a car, train, plane or bus, this kind of sensor detection can still initiate some simple form of “confirmation,” whether from the user or from the vehicle itself.

While automated media conversion has long been available after the fact through “visual voicemail” and improved speech recognition technology that converts voice messages to text, Apple’s Smart Bezel may dynamically control all forms of input and output modalities at the endpoint device level where the user interface action is at. So, while we have always looked at UC’s ability to enable end users to utilize any form of communication exchange between people or between mobile business applications, we still require those end users to make most of those choices manually. Now, maybe it can be done more intelligently and automatically by those multi-modal smartphones that are not just “phones” for conversation anymore.

Stay tuned!

"Mobile Apps" Depend on UC

2011-12-29T19:59:00.004-05:00

Copyright © 2011 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

December 27, 2011

2012: Will “Mobile Apps” Drive The “UC Contact Center?”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As the year 2011 ends and mission-critical business communications technology increasingly shift to personalized, multi-modal, and mobile communications, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with all the technology announcements and blogs that cover various components of “unified communications” (UC). My perspective of UC was never limited to just “person-to-person” collaborative contacts, but included the greater potential of automated, pro-active “notifications” that efficiently tie mission-critical interactive business processes directly to specific individual end users.

Such time-sensitive business processes can be found in many vertical markets, including health care, financial services, field services, education, and even retail sales. Because multi-modal smartphones and tablets enable greater accessibility and interface flexibility to individual end users, proactive outbound contacts can now be more effectively used than traditional telephony-based call center technologies that generated interruptive voice calls and heavy use of live agents to handle calls.

Flexible UC interoperability and end user choice of interfaces for contact initiation and contact reception/response will be the hallmark of mobile applications that business organizations will increasingly exploit. While “person-to-person” business contacts will still be important and necessary to support real-time “collaboration” activities, interactions with automated business process applications will now extend to all end users who carry smartphones for their personal communications.

First Things First – UC For Individual End Users Will Pay Off For Business Process Performance

When people communicate more efficiently within the context of a business process, they also make those business processes more efficient, not just as individual productivity, but as part of the process or the group of individuals involved with the process. In effect, UC benefits for business (UC-B) expand on the communication efficiencies of UC benefits for individual end users (UC-U).

Because UC encompasses the integration and interoperability of a variety of both person-to-person contacts and business process-to-person applications (CEBP), implementation planning is both complex and difficult. With the rapid consumer adoption of multi-modal smartphones and BYOD by business users, the pressure is now on organizations to implement and support UC for all types of end users both inside and outside of the organization. My colleagues at UC Strategies.com have long been discussing the new complexities and challenges of cost-efficiently migrating organizations from legacy endpoint devices (desktop telephones and PCs) to a virtual, mobile UC environment.

Now that Web portals and mobile devices (handheld smartphones and tablets) are making access to information and people more dynamic and location- independent, UC is becoming both more important and more doable. Before we move old infrastructure technologies to UC-based environments, we better come up with a label for the target result that everyone, including end-users and management (not just IT) can recognize and understand. “UC” alone doesn’t do it!

A recent article on mobility for banking and “context-aware computing” quoted technology provider Openstream on its mobility offerings for the banking industry that enables important notifications to mobile end users/customers to dynamically switch from text to voice messages “based on context, location, orientation, motion and the environment. ….Openstream’s software connects with the technology embedded in new mobile phones, tablets, PCs and laptops to sense the devices location and circumstances. That software then serves as a layer between the computing device and the bank.”

While not mentioning “UC” in their product description, Openstream is obviously exploiting the UC concept of “transmodal” communications for outbound notifications. With the mushrooming growth of “mobile apps,” however, we should start to see more use of UC software infrastructure in various types of business process applications. Time-sensitive information delivery and “notifications” to mobile devices will increase business process performance because of increased accessibility to key people in a process, anywhere, anytime.

Step 2: Let’s Call a Spade a Spade – The “UC Contact Center” Is For ALL Business Contacts

With the consolidation of all forms of contact, the UC Contact Center will subsume traditional telephony real-time incoming call-handling functions, whether direct connections (e.g., mobile extensions, DID) or via live assistance. When a synchronous live connection with a particular person or persons cannot be realized, availability information (presence) and messaging alternatives for the caller can be offered to the caller.

When the traditional call center,” based on real-time telephony interactions between an organization and its customers (consumers) shifted to the “contact center,” to try to include email, FAX, and online applications, nothing significant really changed call handling operationally. This was simply because consumers were still stuck with the physical separation of endpoint devices (namely telephones and personal computers), network connectivity (wired, wireless, internal, public), and the lack of consistent, self-service application user interfaces across all of the above.

With the advent of IP connectivity, those physical barriers are disappearing and, in addition to traditional person-to-person contacts, will particularly affect self-service applications that legacy call centers supported through IVR technologies. The limitations of IVR are primarily the need to use voice for both input and output to legacy telephones. While voice input is very convenient and efficient for the end user, speech output for automated self-services is inefficient and therefore limited to short amounts of simple information.

The output problem can be easily resolved with the selective use of screen outputs to a multimedia smartphone. In addition, mobile users will also need the flexibility to use screen/keyboard inputs when in a public or noisy environment or in a meeting environment where speaking would be disruptive. With speech recognition technology that is now much more efficient and accurate, mobile self-service online applications are now becoming more practical and multimodal, witness Apple’s latest iPhone 4S with its Siri “Personal Assistant.” Self-service applications will be able to flexibly use handheld smartphones for input and output as their circumstances demand. However, it will now be necessary for self-service applications to support different user interfaces for the same application functions.

Note that mobile self-service applications include all applications that end users will need, whether they are internal (staff) or external (partner, customer/consumer) users. As long as they are carrying multi-modal mobile devices, they must now all be supported with “mobile apps” that exploit multi-modal interfaces. In addition, it goes without saying, self-service applications will require UC’s ability to change contact modalities, i.e., “click-to-contact” live assistance.

Bottom Line For UC Planning

Even though there has been greater emphasis placed upon person-to-person business contacts under the label of “collaboration,” self-service applications offer the greatest opportunity for cost-efficient business process improvements. The technology benefits of the “contact center” concept can now be extended to all types of end users, both inside and outside of an organization, as well as to all forms of communication contact.

The “UC Contact Center” provides a practical starting point for UC implementation planning, and by focusing on mobile users with multi-modal smartphones, can provide the path to improved business processes and CEBP through self-service applications and “mobile apps.” This will not only help reduce operational business costs but also increase user satisfaction and productivity in very direct and manageable ways.

Doctors Can't Text?

2011-11-22T20:04:00.004-05:00

UC and CEBP Can Provide Fast, Secure Communications For Mobile Service Providers and Consumers

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Health care activities have long been recognized as a big target for UC flexibility, particularly for mobile end users and for personalized automated notifications. However, a recent announcement by the health care industry’s Joint Commission showed the potential for another way UC-enabled applications can play a key role for convenient and efficient contacts.

The Joint Commission stated that texting medical orders directly is not acceptable because of authentication and record keeping requirements. Needless to say, the convenience of using mobile smartphones and tablets would be limited. However, while person-to-person texting is prohibited, person-to-process-to-person should be acceptable, and that’s where Mobile UC flexibility and CEBP come into play.

The doctor who wishes to initiate a medical order can simply do so through a mobile app that first requires secure access and authentication, including a written signature or voice ID if necessary. The order can be input as speech or typed, and then becomes a text message that is then deliverable to authorized recipients, which can include hospitals, pharmacies, and the specific patient. The voice recording of an order is also useful for validating a record of the medical order.

The patient involved can be immediately notified and have access to a copy of an order to be aware of what will be done and to quickly follow up with timely usage of any medications involved.

Doesn’t that look like a multi-modal UC application to you?

UC Interoperability For End Users

2011-11-20T18:10:00.003-05:00

UC Interoperability - Separation of Church, State, And Also End Users

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Unified Communications (UC)-enabled applications must be supported in various ways and “interoperability,” a loose label being used to describe a major challenge (See No Jitter post) in supporting UC’s operational growth. For many providers of UC applications and services, interoperability simply means getting old and new communications applications to work together at various levels, including network access, application user interfaces, and endpoint device form factors and operating systems. However, we also have to consider interoperability as a means of gracefully transitioning from the past to the future. This will not only be a challenge in transitioning technologies, but also challenge to the role of an organization in controlling access to both its information resources and its communications between people (internal staff, customers, and business partners).

When it comes to UC applications, we have to consider is who is providing and supporting those applications as well who is controlling their use at the endpoints. That is why we need to look at business communications from the organizations perspective ("church"), the service provider perspective ("state"), and lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the individual end user perspective.

Business communications (particularly voice telephony) are transitioning away from hardware-based, location-based technologies to "open" software and "virtual" applications that can more easily interoperate with each other. They are also shifting to application-driven real-time notifications and multimedia self-services rather than requiring person-to-person phone calls for real-time information access and delivery. Bottom line is that traditional requirements for enterprise communication control is expanding away from just the wired premise desktop to multi-modal, mobile BYOD devices that will be primarily controlled by the individual end users through UC and shared for the many different contacts with other organizations that the individual end user has “business” relations with.

These technology shifts would suggest that much of yesterday's real-time, voice-only desktop telephony requirements will be significantly reduced in favor of multimedia user interfaces, asynchronous forms of personalized contact, and real-time mobile notifications, with the option of "click-to-call/talk/video" connectivity based on accessibility and availability (presence). End users will be initiating voice conversations differently and managing responses to such contacts differently than traditional call management.

So, the basic question really is how will that transition take place from the perspective of enterprise technology? Will it shift (slowly or quickly) completely or partially (hybrid) to virtual cloud based IP network services that can satisfy application customization, management, and security needs? That's where standards and interoperability become key and both the industry (technology providers, service providers) and the markets still have "one foot on land and one foot in the canoe!"

The "UC Contact Center" For All Business Communications

2011-11-14T18:33:00.004-05:00

November 13, 2011

Welcome To The New “UC Contact Center”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

It is getting very apparent that the current shifting of communications technology to software and mobile, multimodal devices (smartphones, tablets) is also driving business communications towards greater flexibility in initiating and responding to business contacts between people and with automated business process “apps.” Most importantly, with a flexible UC framework, business communications can now selectively accommodate all contact and informational access needs for end users both inside and outside an organization. Such flexibility will have a significant impact on the traditional, telephone-oriented “call center,” enabling its transition to a true, two-way “contact center” between people and business process applications.

Unified communications (UC) has been defined by the experts at UC Strategies as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” That definition seems to have held up well to cover both “communications” and “business processes,” but it leaves open the question of how and when UC can best be implemented.

Because voice telephony is moving to more flexible, efficient, and less expensive IP networking, it is now being viewed as part of general UC capabilities. As such, all business telephony technologies have to be rethought in terms of UC flexibility, and one of the most important areas is the good old “call center.” While leading providers of contact center technology are revising their product offerings under various product names, they really are all expanding telephony call center functionality with multimodal UC capabilities.

The Evolution of the “UC Contact Center”

It all started with the telephone and business callers having to leave messages when they couldn’t speak to a person that could deal with their needs. Before answering machines came into play, “message desks” in large organizations wrote out simple pink message slips identifying the caller, while commercial “answering services” collected transcribed messages for subscriber retrieval when they did not answer their phones (busy, ring no answer). Later, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) technology queued incoming calls for assignment to the next available “agent.”

Such communication services were not restricted to handling incoming calls, but also included outbound dialing to notify the call recipient of an urgent call and, if appropriate, cross-connected the caller to the recipient. In other cases, the answering service included a “dispatch function” to alert a field service person via their wireless pager to call in and retrieve message information from the operator who took the call.

In an attempt to minimize the use of live agents to give callers basic information and handle simple transactions, the call centers started using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technologies to handle incoming calls. However, because of the limitations of the telephone device, caller input was done via the Telephone User Interface (TUI), where all input was made through the Touch-Tone keypad, and all output was done through pre-recorded speech. Needless to say, IVR was useful for only simple applications, and anything complex required the call to be transferred to a queue for a live call center agent.

The “call center” name transitioned to “contact center” many years ago with the growth of the Web and consumer email usage, but one of the real benefits of UC and multimodal smartphones that can now be offered to consumers/customers is to increase easy-to-use self-service applications for information access and transactions. Not only do self-services, if done right, increase user satisfaction with on-demand access and responsiveness, but they also reduce the amount of labor costs to service such customers.

Outbound vs. Inbound Calls

“Call centers” were primarily designed to handle incoming calls from customers who didn’t want to speak to a specific person, just someone who could answer their questions and perform transactions, like make an appointment, change their service information, etc. However, outbound calls were also distributed to call center agents to deliver notifications, reminders, solicit new business, etc. The problem with outbound calls is that there is no guarantee of the accessibility of the person being contacted, so automated outdialing technology was introduced to detect ring/no answer, busy lines, answering machines, etc, before assigning the live call to an agent. If the phone was answered by an answering machine, voice mail, or someone other than the specific person (callee) desired, the calling agent could only leave a message.

With the increasing use of mobile smartphones, not only can a specific person be contacted for a phone connection more easily, but also personalized messages and notifications can be delivered quickly and easily in text or speech to their personal devices. This will be particularly important for time-sensitive notifications such as health care, financial services, and emergency situations.

To add further business benefits from mobile, multimodal smartphones, automated business process applications can initiate such outbound contacts, along with immediate access to self-service functions, without requiring a live agent. With UC capabilities, however, “click-to-contact” options will still allow the customer to access live assistance and expertise contextually from within the notification or self-service application. That minimizes labor costs while still enabling easy and selective access to live assistance for a better customer experience.

The “UC Contact Center” For Internal Users and “Job Contacts”

When you mention the term “contact center,” the old image of dedicated agents handling calls to and from customers is triggered. However, as business users increasingly use mobile smartphones and can benefit from “dual persona” separation of “job contacts” from personal contacts, they too can benefit from timely notifications and on-demand access to live assistance within the organization.

Job contacts can include both traditional “person-to-person” contacts for collaborative activities, as well as contacts through Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Again, both person-to-person contacts and timely automated notifications can be efficiently utilized when the recipients are using multimodal smartphones. So, there will be many business process “use cases” that can benefit from the combination of UC and the centralized, multimodal “UC Contact Center.”

Bottom Line For UC Planning

For these reasons, all legacy call centers have to be on the top of the list for UC migration planning. There will be implications for how dedicated contact center “agents” are trained, monitored, evaluated, etc. for maximum job performance in a multimodal, telecommuting environment. Customer interactions will likewise be affected by CRM issues that will change because of dynamic mobile contacts, both inbound and outbound.

Now is also the time to trial self-service applications for both customers and for internal users to insure that the user experience will be most effective when deployed for general use. Such trials can be done more quickly and less expensively by exploiting CaaS (Communications as a Service) offerings, before finalizing procurement and implementation decisions.

IBM Sets BYOD Example

2011-11-01T14:58:00.005-04:00

November 1, 2011

IBM ‘s BYOD Approach Shows The Way To Enterprise Mobile UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I have long suggested that business UC implementation planning include mobility use cases for several practical reasons.

Mobile users have greater need for UC flexibility
Mobile business users will also be mobile consumers
Business applications that deal with time-sensitive notifications can benefit from end user Mobile UC
Mobile accessibility will require federated presence information that UC can support
Messaging with “click-to-call/chat” is becoming more practical with mobile smartphones
Mobile access to web portals make multi-modal devices more effective for application interactions

The big news in business communications is that IBM is supporting employee use of their own mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), while focusing on secure access to internal information. By the end of the this year, 100,000 IBM employees will be able to securely access IBM internal networks with their own devices and network services that will also be used for personal applications and entertainment (dual persona). In 2012, another 100,000 employees will also be BYOD enabled.

Employees will be paying for their own devices and will require loading IBM management software for security purposes. In addition, IBM will require passwords and use VPNs for access to information applications. Initially, IBM will provide contact and calendar access through its Lotus Traveler.

In addition to allowing employees to use public mobile apps, IBM will also provide approved third-party and internal apps from its Whirlwind app store, launched in late 2010.

IBM’s move to BYOD will expand the role of UC for its mobile users, enabling both person-to-person contact flexibility and CEBP notifications from time-sensitive applications. IBM’s BYOD policy is setting an example for large organizations to migrate their legacy telephony business communications to a more cost efficient and productive virtual and mobile UC environment.

See article at:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221289/IBM_opens_up_smartphone_tablet_support_for_its_workers?taxonomyId=15

Back-to-the-Future - Real-time Collaborative Communications

2011-10-27T14:10:00.001-04:00

October 26, 2011

Back-to-the Future 2 – Collaborative Communications in Time-Sharing Systems

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Being a “pioneer” isn’t always fun, especially if you have to wait forty years for the world to catch up with you.

In my last blog, I described how “time-sharing” was the start of online applications before the Internet and the Web made them a lot easier and cheaper. I helped speed up the commercialization of time-sharing systems by getting Scientific Data Systems (SDS) to adopt the Berkeley time-sharing system as an early product offering. However, before moving to SDS, I also was able to help bring real-time “collaboration” and, what today would be called text “chat,” into time-shared applications.

The SDC Time-sharing System

System Development Corporation, a spin-off the Rand Corporation, was tasked to develop one of the first “time-sharing” systems for ARPA. As described in my previous article, the objective was for remote end users to independently access various “interactive “ applications in real-time, dialing in on telephone lines from Teletype terminals. However, there was no person-to-person connectivity function involved.

In 1964, SDC was going to give a paper on the time-sharing system at a big computer conference in Washington, DC and I had the responsibility for demonstrating it at a small booth in the exhibit area.

I saw the value of having an interactive application simultaneously accommodate more one person at a time, so I talked to the programmer who was developing the communication front-end computer interface for connecting remote end users over the telephone network. I suggested that, instead of a single field associated with remote user connections, that two fields be provided. That would allow the two users to simultaneously interact with the same application, both seeing all inputs and outputs concurrently. However, the programmer wasn’t sure that the effort was really important or that it could be done in time for the conference.

The LINK Command

A week before the conference, the programmer called me to tell me he had done what I had asked, by adding an online command to the time-sharing system user interface. In addition to “linking” two remote terminals together with a time-shared application, the ‘linked” users could type in text messages for both to see. That was our version of today’s text “chat” function.

I immediately notified the various researchers, who were developing a variety of interactive applications on our time-sharing system, to plan on being on the system during the times that I planned to demonstrate the SDC time-sharing system at the computer show in Washington. I was then able to “visit” with each of the researchers to see and try the different interactive applications they had developed.

Summary

Needless to say, computer show attendees who were used to batch-processing, premise-based main frames, could not believe what they saw from the Model 33 ASR terminals connected to standard phone lines that I was using. The computer system itself was three thousand miles away and they could interact in real-time with different applications and concurrently exchange text messages with the people who were also three thousand miles away.

Although this demonstration was very simple and primitive compared to what the Internet and text messaging technologies do today, e.g., email, chat, file sharing, etc., it did help shift the original vision of time-sharing from simply remote access to interactive computing applications to the potential of direct communications between users on the network and to “collaborative” online interactions with shared applications. The SDC system was not a commercial product and the “LINK” concept did not go anywhere. The world had to wait for the Internet and email to provide universal access to online text communications.

Today, with UC and multi-modal, mobile devices, we are seeing that early vision being expanded from person-to-person communications to process-to-person contacts and interactions (CEBP).

Back-To-The-Future of "Cloud" Services

2011-10-25T03:47:00.002-04:00

October 23, 2011

Back To The Future – Before The Web And The “Cloud,” There Was Interactive “Time-sharing”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As we watch “cloud-based” applications, Mobile UC, and IP networking take over communications between people and business process applications, I find it interesting to go back to the early days of business computers that were limited to premise-based mainframes and “batch processing” with punched cards. That’s when I got involved with enabling computers to support remote end users with keyboard terminals to access “interactive” applications.

Although most of the heavy technology lifting was done by clever engineers and software developers, I was fortunate in being able to contribute to the initial implementation of interactive (online) computing before personal computers, and now the Internet and World Wide Web, started taking over business and social communications.

Because mainframe computers were big, slow, expensive, and with limited processing power, it was not practical for individual end users to use computers the way they can now. Sponsored by ARPA’s J.C.R. Licklider, some bright people at MIT, Stanford University, etc., developed the concept of letting a number of users share a computer interactively, independently, and concurrently by time-slicing the CPU and swapping active user programs dynamically between secondary storage and main memory.

Time-sharing also introduced the beginning of what we refer today as the “user experience” that has become the focus of good business communications. Slow input and output taking place concurrently via keyboards and printers or display terminals, allowed each user to feel that they were directly in control of their own computer application and could interact accordingly. As it still is today for online and “mobile” apps, fast response to typical user input commands, i.e., under five seconds, was a target requirement for interactive applications.

If you mention the term “time-sharing” today to most people, they will say it is “vacation ownership!” At an early 1960’s meeting of the country’s technology leaders supported by ARPA (now DARPA), I suggested that they come up with a better, more descriptive name than “time-sharing,” but the wrangling that followed didn’t accomplish anything.

Making Time-sharing Commercially Viable

Because mainframe computers were still very expensive to be converted into time-sharing systems, some research organizations started looking for more commercially viable platforms to move forward with. UC Berkeley’s Project Genie was one such effort that I had a hand in helping it be successful.

Berkeley’s Project Genie chose to modify an existing, relatively inexpensive scientific computer, the SDS 930, from Scientific Data Systems (SDS) to support a time-sharing environment. However, as described by the Project Genie people, “When the system was working, Max Palevsky, founder of Scientific Data Systems, was at first not interested in selling it as a product. He thought time-sharing had no commercial demand.”

At that time, I had just joined SDS because they were starting to see the potential of developing a time-sharing product and I had been active at System Development Corp. (SDC) in the development of one of the first time-sharing systems sponsored by ARPA. I was interviewed personally by Max Palevsky and had argued with him as to the potential commercial benefits of time-sharing for business applications. He was planning to develop a next-generation business computer (Sigma) that would include online time-sharing in addition to traditional batch processing.

My ARPA connections contacted me about the Berkeley system and recommended that I look at it personally. After visiting with the Project Genie personnel and trialing its very well designed user interface and application software, I could see that it was indeed ready for the market. When I reported my suggestions to the SDC marketing management, they were not interested because of their own Sigma plans.

However, there was an upcoming computer show in Las Vegas where SDS was going to be exhibiting at, so I asked the marketing manager what he was planning to highlight at the exhibit booth. He responded that he wasn’t sure yet, and did I have any ideas?

I then told him that UC Berkeley, an SDS customer, was giving a paper on their time-sharing system at this conference and it would be helpful to them if we let them demonstrate their system at the SDS exhibit. All that was needed was a phone line and an inexpensive Teletype machine. He thought that was a good idea and a week later reported back to me that everything was arranged.

That is when I let him know that SDS now had a problem; visitors to the exhibit will see a demo of an SDS-based computer system and will ask how much it will cost to buy one. What would be the answer?

The next day, Max Palevsky called a meeting of his management staff and decided that if anyone was interested in buying the Berkeley version of the SDS 930 computer system, the initial total cost of documenting and testing the modifications that Berkeley had made, i.e., approximately $100,000, would be added to the SDS 930 purchase price. On that basis, the answer to a buyer’s question would be “yes,” but there would be no prior public announcement.

Since I knew that all the players in the ARPA community were looking to acquire a commercially available time-sharing system, I immediately notified them all of the Berkeley system availability as an SDS product. That triggered an avalanche of orders that year and became “the most successful computer in SDS history, earning $40 million in sales and a devoted following among scientists and researchers worldwide. It ushered in the new business of commercial timesharing and was the initial hardware base for two major timesharing service companies,” (particularly Tymshare).

Whenever I saw Bob Taylor, (Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office and founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory), he would always ask me, ”Art, did Max say thank you yet?”

Lessons Learned

Time-sharing technology opened the doors to real-time interactions between end users and computer applications, the hallmark of today’s online Internet and World Wide Web. It also broke down the barriers to remote access by initially using the existing wired telephone networks to provide online service access directly to end-users, eventually moving to data networks like Tymshare’s Tymnet. The bottom line for time-sharing service success was the individual end-user experience and demand for interactive applications. SDS’s success with the Berkeley system confirmed that time-to-market was a critical factor in product planning. After Xerox acquired SDS, it unsuccessfully tried to enter the time-sharing services business, but, by then, the PC had started to take over business applications.

Today, Mobile UC is expanding upon the Internet and World Wide Web in providing flexible, multimodal, person-to-person and process-to-person communications services across personalized handheld and portable endpoint devices (smartphones, tablets). UC provides an integration framework that enables end users to use their mobile multimodal devices selectively and dynamically for both personal and business needs (dual persona). With virtual and cloud-based business applications becoming more accessible to end users, there is no question that consumers and business users will all be heavily using device-independent UC in a two-way, multimodal service network environment, expanding upon the original concepts of interactive computer time-sharing.

After Eleven Years - The Mobile Customer Is Here and Needs UC

2011-10-21T14:41:00.010-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

I think below is the first article that I (and my partner, Dave Zimmer) seriously discussed customer contacts based upon the potential of coming "smartphone" developments for exploiting unified communications (UC) for business. I didn't consider the future development of portable tablets, which could be used standing up or sitting down. However, I did focus on customers/consumers as the future targets for mobile (wireless) notifications and interactions, because that's where business benefits will come from (revenues, profits, etc.). Thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple, the smartphone and mobile tablets are household names for consumers.

Now (after eleven years), that smartphones have become a reality in both the business and consumer worlds, the role of unified communications (UC) for exploiting multimodal flexibility has to be taken seriously by business and government organizations, large and small, in planning to replace the shortcomings of traditional telephone systems. To further complicate matters, such a displacement can now be accommodated by hosted, cloud-based software services, rather than premise-based hardware systems. So, change is definitely coming but the migration strategies have to be selectively defined for specific business process applications (CEBP), as well as for all specific end user types involved in such business processes.

Obviously, this old editorial post needs to be updated to reflect what is now really available..

Editorial from 06-19-2000

Are They Standing Up

or Sitting Down?

Wireless (Mobile) Communications With Enterprise Customers

The convergence of universal wireless voice and two-way messaging communications will open up new avenues for electronic commerce interactions between an enterprise and its customers. With browser-enabled wireless smartphones or palmtops, users will have increased access to on-line information and transactions. This will include simple information retrieval ("pull") in text or voice, as well as timely information notification and delivery ("push").

As has been hyped so much in the press lately, the promise of wireless multimedia smartphones or palm devices will make Web-based information and transactions more simple and convenient for anytime, anywhere access. So users don’t have to be necessarily sitting down in front of a desktop/laptop PC; they can be standing up and even be moving around (carefully).

With more efficiently packaged bite-sized Web information designed for ubiquitous and convenient communications devices, the user audience for such information will expand significantly. Smartphones also allow for cross-media information access, so that, for example, really mobile users driving a car or moving about can have hands-free, eyes-free control of information and messages through speech input and output rather than using the screen and keypad.

Although there is still great speculation within the unified communications services industry about the limitations of both the small displays associated with wireless smartphones and the cross-media use of voice input/output, there is no question that the proliferation of these multimedia devices for personal communications will have an impact on how enterprise contact centers will have to support their customers for wireless (mobile) Customer Relationship Management (“mCRM?”).

Application Messaging and Transaction Services

Going beyond simple information retrieval to push information delivery, service providers can provide delivery of personalized information (text or voice) on a scheduled or immediate, event-driven basis to subscriber mailboxes and/or to wireless smartphones. Thus, for example, when important financial news is delivered by a message from an application process, it can be immediately followed up with an appropriate interactive transaction. Major online stock brokerages are already offering such capabilities today (e.g., Charles Schwab & Co. Inc.).

Like all forms of messaging, the key to application messaging is notification, which is a means of gaining the attention of the recipient for permission to enable real-time messaging access. (See last Monday's column on the role of Message Notification.) This process can be made more intelligent through personalized filtering and screening rules that prioritize such immediate access to the subscriber. If the subscriber is unavailable at the moment, a response or callback message can be left for later activation to confirm or complete the transaction.

Live Assistance

As has been well-established by experience to date with all forms of customer self-service applications, including traditional telephone-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology and the more recent PC-based multimedia transactions on the World Wide Web, the availability of live customer assistance, either via immediate conversational connections (text chat, voice) or through timely messaging response, is a prerequisite for successful tele-commerce. It is here, at the customer touchpoints, that exploding wireless usage will have a ripple effect on how the enterprise must conduct its e-business.

Traditional customer-enterprise interactions, telephone or Web-based, will be affected in several functional enterprise support areas by customers using wireless multimedia communications devices, including:

1. Self-service information retrieval ("pull")

2. Application messaging -- Automated real-time notifications, confirmations, information delivery ("push")

3. Consultative online customer assistance

4. Customer two-way messaging and callbacks

5. Outbound telemarketing

Space considerations preclude a detailed discussion of each of the above topics, but suffice it to say, that pocket wireless multimedia smartphones will have limitations for customers because of screen size and, to some extent, a lack of a full keyboard, but they will have important advantages because of immediate wireless accessibility and cross-media options. The latter will include functional service features such as plain text Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (text, voice), and "always on" accessibility.

With Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) service implementations, short message responses can include links to appropriate Web-based information or transactions. (Although there are shortcomings to the current WAP capabilities, concurrent voice connections and Web information access is an expected future for wireless usage.)

Personal Presence Management, Customer Contact, and Privacy

The SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) chip currently used in all GSM wireless phones is the smart card that identifies the user and enables personalization of wireless services. Such identification also plays into locating the subscriber’s device and determining its availability for contact. Thus, unlike traditional wired telephones, where there is no guarantee if it will be answered or who will be answering the phone, the customer with a personalized wireless smartphone can be pre-determined to be available for contact.

For example, the criteria for immediate message notification or call connection may be determined by where the subscriber happens to be. If the subscriber is not sitting at a desktop PC, delivering a document attachment is useless; however, notification that it is available is appropriate, and being aware of wireless accessibility is key. This kind of presence information will enable the enterprise to more quickly respond to a customer inquiry or request, in the appropriate format or mode (immediate live assistance callback/connection, informational message response, document transmission, etc.).

On the other hand, traditional outbound telemarketing may exploit such capabilities to intrude upon the user at any time to deliver a sales pitch. No longer will it be just the dinnertime sales phone call that will be a privacy invasion. It may be the delivery of a sales message alert or even a live pitch just because you happen to be walking by a store that has a sale on something that a marketing campaign has identified you as a prospect.

To add insult to injury, because of the current approach taken by wireless telephone services in this country, the subscriber receiving the telemarketing call usually gets to pay for the privilege rather than the originator of the call.

Free or not, it is clear that effective personal call/message management has to be the hallmark for universal communications accessibility, and wireless unified communications services will have to support convenient call/message screening to protect its subscribers.

Respectfully,

Rosenberg and Zimmer

The Unified View

UC Analytics Needed to Manage Multi-modal Contact Center Evolution

2011-10-09T22:58:00.004-04:00

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Unified communications (UC) are slowly replacing voice only telephony in business communications, particularly for personalized end user mobility. That involves more than the business processes themselves through traditional telephony-based “call centers”, but also the performance of live customer assistance through customer-facing staff (agents, subject matter experts, field support, sales contacts, etc.). More importantly, with the rapid consumer adoption of mobile smartphones and tablets, there is also an increasing use of automated multi-modal self-service applications, supported by UC “click-to-call” options. Under the label of “analytics,” all aspects of customer interaction activities are being captured and analyzed to improve customer satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity.

While there is no question about the importance of understanding how customers and support staff are performing in various business processes, most of the contact center technology announcements coming from traditional telephony-oriented providers still focus heavily on the voice conversations between people and call center staff and using “speech analytics” as a key objective for customer service analysis.

On the other hand, there is also increasing use of analytics to monitor and track all kinds of automated business process applications in order to improve the efficiency and ease of use of such activities. Information Week recently surveyed business executives on the shift to “innovation” in supporting end user needs and making business processes (which has to include communication contacts with people) more efficient. The study highlights the importance for UC and CEBP, showing CIO responsibilities outside of IT for telecommunications as the highest (64%) domain of responsibility and interest.

The study also describes how “innovation” is taking over automating business process applications, particularly in online/self-service activities, and is relying on more comprehensive analytics to monitor, evaluate, and improve such processes from an end user interface perspective. Since UC is not limited to just speech interfaces with automated self-service applications, it is obviously going to be a powerful element of any automated application process, as well as providing access to available live assistance when necessary. However, even as consumers rapidly adopt mobile, multi-modal end point devices (smartphones, tablets) for business contacts and interactions, the analytics world seems to be slow to integrate voice telephony contacts as part of the brave new world of seamless UC.

Business Communications - What We Say Is Only Part Of What We Do

Capturing what people say during a business call can be useful, especially if it helps describe the customer’s state of mind and satisfaction with the business process. Analyzing conversations for keywords and emotions can provide insights into what the customer is doing and, if displayed in real-time to a customer-facing agent, can expedite better resolution of the operational issues involved. That’s like having a customer hooked up to a lie detector while discussing any problem that requires live assistance. But, do we need that much “analytics” data all the time?

UC, by definition, covers all forms of business contacts and interactions; so tracking all communication activities is an effective way to monitor all business communications, not just customer interactions. The practical definition of UC as a concept has been well stated for a number of years by UC Strategies, i.e., “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” After all, business processes involve internal staff, external business partners, as well as consumer/customers. So, we really need to be looking selectively at key business processes as the starting point for what communication activities with people the analytic tools need to be tracking.

With the increased adoption of smartphones for all forms of contact with people, especially for text based messaging (SMS, chat, social networking, email), voice conversations are slowly becoming less significant for interaction analytics. So, the fact that technology for capturing and analyzing voice has become very sophisticated, that does not mean that all other forms of business contacts should be ignored. In particular, automated business processes that initiate time-sensitive notification contacts with individual end users (CEBP), will not be having voice conversations with customers and will exploit text and visual interfaces of personal smartphones and tablets.

Self-service Applications and UC

I recently reviewed a report in Speech Technology magazine on contact center technologies that focused primarily on call management and speech analytics to evaluate and manage customer-facing agents. Referred to as Work Force Optimization (WFO), the article describes the progress of speech analytics as key to evaluating both agent performance and customer satisfaction. While this perspective is certainly valid for customer contacts via traditional phones, it is definitely not adequate for exploiting multimedia self-service application access by customers through multi-modal mobile devices.

In talking to an old colleague, Jeff Schlueter, marketing VP at Nexidia, a leading provider of Enterprise Speech Intelligence software, I raised the question of how speech analytics fits into the overall multi-modal mobile UC picture. His first response was that smartphones was all that he personally needed. Then I reminded him that UC is not just about person-to-person contacts and that enterprise applications needed to be integrated into the picture (CEBP). Obviously, their technology is still evolving and that perspective remains to be defined and developed.

Needless to say, speech analytics does become useful when speech is involved for information input, whether in a voice conversation or even when speech commands are used as self-service application inputs. Otherwise, tracking all forms of user interactions is necessary for monitoring and evaluating end user communication activities. That’s why business communications need the flexibility of UC as well as comprehensive analytic tools to track all interactions that may occur during the course of a business process.

Steve Jobs and UC

2011-10-06T03:26:00.002-04:00

October 5, 2011

Steve Jobs and UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I had just finished posting this old article I wrote about the first iPhone announcement, when I heard the news of Steve Jobs passing. So, in a way this is a tribute to his vision of the mobile devices to support what end users really want to communicate and access information in a UC environment.

Steve Jobs will be sorely missed!

Here’s what I wrote about the first release of Apple’s iPhone back in January of 2007. The recent announcement of iPhone 4S (instead of the expected iPhone 5) didn’t get rave reviews except for the new “Siri” capability which enables speech input for a variety of functional informational and messaging tasks. However, it was a step forward in the right direction.

The new Apple bringing more innovation to mobile communications?

Well, Apple, no longer calling itself “Apple Computer,” got your attention, didn’t it?

The big splash it made with it’s iPhone announcement seemed to draw everyone’s attention to what we have been waiting for in UC - end-user demand. That demand will come from individual consumer needs (communications, entertainment, customer contacts) and individual work-related needs (desktop, roaming, traveling, mobile communications and information exchange). The common denominator between consumers and business users is the communications piece, and that’s exactly where application client software fits in with well-designed multimodal mobile devices and user interface form factors.

Industry pundits almost hysterically jumped on the Apple iPhone announcement, pointing out that most of the functionality is not really new, having been incorporated in legacy technologies like voice mail and cell phones. They also highlighted missing pieces like the lack of 3G cellular, speech interfaces for mobile users who might need it for hands-free, eyes-free situations, the fact that text input really benefits from a “hard” alphanumeric keyboard rather than a button-less screen, and that “visual voicemail” has been around for years for the few enterprise systems that moved beyond the desktop telephone TUI. However, they also grudgingly admit that the packaging was innovatively well done, the missing elements can be added in a variety of ways, and, last but not least, their device design success will be emulated by the competition.

“Different strokes for different folks!”

The bottom line for all coming mobile “UC smartphones” (a generic descriptor), is that they will come in many form factors and combination of features to support the different needs and preferences of the individual end user for business and personal contacts, including business applications, and consumer entertainment. Enterprise organizations will have to support such end user UC devices and UC in the same way they supported TDM/TUI telephony for universal phone access over the PSTN, except now it has to be multimodal communications over IP and wireless networks too.

The enterprise UC ball is in the business end user mobile smartphone court!

Ever since the IP telephony and messaging technology developers started touting “unified communications,” the enterprise market has been sitting on its hands wondering why, when and how they should start migrating to the converged world of UC. Well, the writing is on the wall, as handheld device designs become the center of attention for accommodating the complexities of converged communication applications, rather than focusing on just infrastructure cost savings to do traditional phone call and messaging functions.

In a recent column (before CES /MacWorld) I highlighted the role of mobile communications as a driver for unified communications in the enterprise. I pointed out that increased mobile accessibility would enable greater contact efficiency and therefore faster task performance by everyone involved in the business process. That would include people inside and outside of the enterprise organization, and to do that means making UC services universal, like good old PSTN telephony.

One of the key assumptions about such benefits from UC capabilities was that more and more people would be carrying personalized, multimodal, mobile devices that would be flexible enough to maximize real-time business communications in any form, not just voice. While UC is useful at the desktop with PC-based softphones and text messaging, UC will really pay off when users are “mobile” and need to switch modalities all the time.

Conclusion

The “UC industry” is making progress by consolidating infrastructure, application, and communication device needs. Until end users see everything at the interface level, they won’t understand the difference UC will make for them. Enterprise management must also see those benefits as well, otherwise there just won’t be much movement in UC migration based on cost reductions alone

Strategic Role of Unified Analytics for UC

2011-08-13T18:21:00.002-04:00

The Strategic Role For Unified Analytics In UC

Posted on August 13th, 2011 by Art Rosenberg

Note: I haven't been writing lately due to some serious health problems, but I still have been watching the UC world evolve.

Jim Burton just wrote a provocative blog on NoJitter entitled “The Next Phase in Communications.” It referred to the role of analytics in the evolution of UC. Labeling that capability as “UC-A,” it “adds analytics and metrics to business processes.” With that thought in mind, I see “Unified Analytics” as being key tools to both UC planning and managing effective and efficient business process performance wherever people are involved.

One of the biggest challenges for any size UC implementation is to plan for its selective use in high-value business processes. That includes knowing which end users will require which UC capabilities and which business applications will also be involved through CEBP integrations. So, this means understanding where both person-to-person contact activities need the flexibility of UC, as well as which business process applications need to initiate contacts with which people and how.

Unfortunately, no one may really know what is needed and where, when it comes to UC planning. Compound that with the sad economy and existing legacy technologies, it is hard to make a quantifiable case for UC benefits, either “UC-U” or “UC-B.” Although everyone talks about proper and selective UC implementation planning, there really have been no tools to do that easily.

As Jim points out, “contact center” technology has been improving its “analytics” capabilities for a number of years, primarily to evaluate customer satisfaction and customer-facing agent performance. Such analytics have started to move beyond just call handling to other forms of customer contacts and interactions. I believe the technology has reached a point where analytics can play a bigger role in UC implementation, by providing the tools to evaluate all current business processes and communications activities in order to quantify and prioritize UC planning for everyone in the organization as well as those outside of the organization that may be involved with a business process.

The timing for such a “universal” view of unified business communications is most appropriate as the rapid adoption of multi-modal smartphones means that ALL end users will be able to benefit effectively from the flexibility of UC and the integration with business process applications through CEBP. It is just that organizations need to know where best to selectively start their UC migration, whether via hosted, “cloud”-based services, traditional internal technologies, or a hybrid combination of both.

“Analytics,” like “UC,” covers a lot of territory that is continually expanding beyond the limitations of traditional telephony communications, but has not really penetrated the market much beyond traditional call center operations. However, it’s potential value from a number of management perspectives is starting to be recognized. The lack of standards and definitions for UC capabilities hasn’t helped the problem either. I think it is now time that analytic tools can help management understand who is doing what in all business process communications and lead the way to practical UC implementation planning.

Let's see what leading analytics developers like Verint come up with!

What do you think?

You can contact me at artr@ix.netcomm.com or (310) 395-2360

Avaya Gets UC Moving With Healthcare Mobility

2011-02-26T19:40:00.004-05:00

At Last! Avaya Embraces “Dual Personna” Mobility For Health Care Apps

by Art Rosenberg

I know that one of my UC Strategies colleagues, Don Van Doren, attended the 2011 HIMSS Conference in Atlanta and should be able to report more details in how UC is making progress with health care applications. However, I was very impressed to see Avaya jumping in with both feet to exploit mobile devices for both hospital staff as well as mobile patient contacts to fully exploit UC for operational efficiency and effectiveness. (Never mind reduced telephony costs because of IP Telephony and SIP trunking!)

I have always seen mobility as the real driver for end user interest and benefits from UC and Avaya has finally connected some of the dots between the hospital environment, health care information systems, and patients who are not in a hospital environment but are key participants in operational performance issues. Given that the health care topic is at the top of this country’s financial concerns, anything that will help improve the performance of health care activities will get attention from everybody!

So, the headlines that got my attention are some of Avaya’s new solutions announced at HIMSS this past week. What’s important is that this is not just a start-up company with a bright idea, but an experienced technology provider with an established market share that is finally delivering something significantly better to the marketplace. (So, expect others to follow suit accordingly!)

Mobile Device Checkout - Basically, this new function supports “dual personna” mobility on premise by letting hospital staff use their own, personalized mobile devices to be be automatically accessible through the hospital’s phone system and WLAN, by generating a temporary unique phone number. It allows for role-based-contacts, rather than having to know specific individual names and numbers, and it ties into a presence-based system for locating personnel. Yeah!
Nurse Call Response - This solution replaces the need for a patient to contact a nurse’s station in order to talk the nurse responsible for her care, but will initiate the contact directly with the appropriate nurse either available or assigned such responsibility. This reduces the wasted time delay and frustrations for a patient who needs immediate attention. (The announcement did not mention any options for such call contacts to exploit the benefits of UC with visual information on a smart-phone device.)
Patient Admit Coordinator - This “workflow” solution targets patients coming to an Emergency Room for treatment to be admitted to a hospital bed. Currently, such procedures are paper-based, slow, inefficient, and costly. (I know from recent personal experience!)
Patient Appointment Reminder - This is not really anything new, but is a basic application that can capitalize on the multi-modality of UC for personalized notifications. It is particularly useful for health care and especially for senior citizens whose memory starts to suffer with age. It is also useful for other types of reminders, such as time to take a particular medication, or if an automated patient monitoring application detects a new problem, the need to see a particular doctor or take a particular medication suddenly becomes critical.

The above applications are tied to mobility of the individual end user, either as a contact initiator or a contact recipient, which in turn is tied to UC for flexible communications. I am sure there are other apps/solution examples in the health care environment, and some of these will also apply to other business activities, e.g., appointment reminders, CEBP applications, etc. So, I am glad to see some of the fundamental visions of UC that I and my colleagues have been pushing for several years starting to be realized in the real world.

What Do You Think?
Contact me at artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360

Avaya Opens Up Another Space For UC – Meeting New People With “Virtual” Group Conferencing

2011-02-17T21:38:00.004-05:00

Copyright © 2011 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

February 17, 2011

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I don’t know about you, but there is so much change going on with business communication technologies in the evolution to a “unified communications” (UC) environment, that it is hard to keep up with all the products and services that are being announced. This is particularly true because “UC” is subsuming all kinds of telephony usage and is being applied to every aspect of communication technologies with people, including network infrastructures, mobile multimodal endpoint devices, business process application integrations, and multimedia end user interfaces.

Because I don’t have the time to attend conferences or webinars at different times and locations, I rely heavily on the objective, first-hand reviews that my UC Strategy colleagues and other industry analysts who report on a variety of new announcements and discussions at conferences and presentations. This includes the big shift taking place from CPE hardware products and software suites to software-based and hosted “cloud” application services.

Who Will Control The UC Market?

Although I am interested in the technology startups that develop new UC capabilities that will directly benefit individual end users or enterprise management, I pay particular attention to the leading technology providers that already have large installed business organization customer bases. They will be the ones that can stay out in front of the evolving “business UC market,” providing that their products and services stay tuned into what different types of end users really need and want in order to flexibly initiate or respond to multi-modal contacts with other people and/or self-service applications.

From a telephony perspective, it’s all about migrating from the limitations and culture of legacy wired, desktop TDM telephony and conversational voice to mobile and multimodal SIP-based connections, where unified communication applications can take hold. Voice conferencing for group discussions and presentations long ago shifted to Internet web conferencing and webinars, so I was curious to see what Avaya’s latest announcement about web.alive in the enterprise space was bringing to the UC table. (Like many other new application product/service offerings, the names given to them are not very descriptive and “web.alive” is no exception.)

Web.alive Virtual Voice Conferencing

The “alive” label seems to be the latest buzzword to discuss real-time communications and interactions between people. According to Avaya, here’s what’s new for them for their web.alive offering in business group voice conferencing:

“The new purchasing options make Avaya web.alive available as a service through a monthly subscription for individual hosts or via annual concurrent user based pricing. Business organizations can also opt to install and manage the software on their own servers. The flexibility of purchase options enables any size business or organization to use Avaya web.alive for meetings, training, or sales and service opportunities involving both internal and external participants.”

“In addition to the purchasing options, new features and capabilities in Avaya web.alive include:

New 3D audio engine for dramatic spatial audio that helps participants better identify and understand who is speaking and their location within the environment.
Built-in collaboration tools including desktop sharing and cooperative web browsing
Avaya Aura SIP interface for integration with existing communications infrastructure enabling participants to join a collaboration session via the telephone or inside of the web.alive environment
New templates that make it easy to design environments that meet the needs of a company or host.
Downloadable SDK to enable customers or hosts to independently create and upload their own custom content.
Analytics that provide the data to enhance collaboration, selling or learning efforts. For example, insight can be gained into traffic and conversation patterns, sales and presentation effectiveness, travel savings, etc. The notification engine can email contact center agents when customers have entered an Avaya web.alive sales or service.”

As you can see, Avaya is capitalizing on its experience, market share, in legacy in legacy voice telephony to upgrade telephone conferencing with greater operational flexibility, manageability, and lower costs. These are all useful benefits for business organizations that have to deal with remote end users, whether inside or outside of the organization. The latter is particularly important for supporting business partners and customers, who will be communicating with a variety of endpoint devices and services that are not controllable by the sponsoring enterprise. However, their traffic analytics technology can monitor any form of contact from the outside and automatically notify appropriate staff personnel (contact center agents, subject matter experts, operational management, etc.) if live assistance is needed.

So, What’s Really New?

From an end user perspective, which I really look for in driving demand and adoption of anything new in business operations, Avaya has facilitated easy access to any audience members who want to participate in group presentations and discussions. In addition to traditional “virtual’ web conferencing facilities, they allow audience members to interact on a “face-to-face” basis, but without the expense and effort of a video conference.

The web.alive platform also enables a variety of UC-based messaging activities that are controllable by the individual conference participants as either contact initiators or recipients within a common context of the web presentation. This pays off in less travel cost and business process performance time, as well as convenience for end users who are increasingly remote, in other organizations, and even mobile. This makes it ideal for a public, “cloud-based” service rather than a premise-based, enterprise responsibility.

A good characterization of what web.alive does differently is to allow end users of any type to participate in the audience and also selectively “collaborate” with other individuals in an online conference without necessarily having a relationship beforehand. That is what attracts people to attend trade shows where individual attendees can find new people to talk to and exchange information without scheduling a meeting first. All they have to do is be available and communication accessible at the same time, which means that contacts can also be made with “experts,” who are not necessarily attending audience members.

From a UC perspective, the ability to exploit email, IM, SMS, etc. for such new ad hoc contacts is a big plus, because two-way, real-time voice conversations are more difficult to do instantly all the time and appropriate for simple information exchange and collaborative work. Talking may also be inappropriate while listening to a group presentation or discussion. Such different contacts can be initiated separately and concurrently by the audience individuals involved, not just by the speakers or presenters.

The “immersive” use of 3D spatial audio and video avatars is an attempt at recreating the face-to-face conference environment, but the use of face-to-face avatars doesn’t do much for me. I would be satisfied with a real-time voice conversation and the display of information related to the subject at hand, rather than watching an avatar. (Although if you wanted to watch the reaction of a group of people in the audience who are not talking, the avatar approach might be one way to try to do that using some form of automated “group assessment” of facial reactions.)

What is most important from an implementation perspective is that Avaya is moving its real-time telephony technology to a supplementary, UC-based, flexible conferencing service offering that includes users from anywhere, including enterprise customers, with lower pricing and ease of integration with legacy phone systems. So take a look at it from the perspective of a step forward with UC in a group conferencing environment.

For detailed reports on Avaya’s web.alive demo, go to:

http://www.nojitter.com/feature/229218514?pgno=2

http://www.nojitter.com/blog/229215659

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

iPads and Tablets Join UC

2010-12-20T14:57:00.002-05:00

Copyright 2010 (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

December 15, 2010

Will iPads and Tablets Replace Enterprise Laptops and Desktop Softphones for UC?

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

In the early days of UC, “softphones” (screen-based PC telephony), offered UC flexibility where traditional desktop “hardphones” were lacking. It is still a viable alternative for wired, location-based telephony.

However, mobile smartphones are making a huge dent in the consumer and business user markets for multimodal UC applications. That is, until the larger screen size of tablets came into the picture. Now, a user has a choice of two kinds of mobile devices, one convenient for the hand and one portable enough to carry along, but with a larger screen interface for better visual information access.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on the subject of mobility and what the user experience would be like if the user was standing up or sitting down. Obviously, that experience will vary with the size of the device, the screen, and its impact on on the user interface. When worse comes to worse, and no screen can be looked at (e.g., driving a car), then speech interfaces come into play, and that is one good reason that mobility needs multimodal UC flexibility.

So, with UC convergence, business applications need to be endpoint device independent, not only in terms of screen-based interfaces vs. speech interfaces, but also based on the size of the screens for handheld devices , portable tablets and iPads, and wired desktop PCs. The choice will be based upon who the users are and what they need to do their jobs, whether premise-based or mobile. It is becoming intuitively obvious that most business users will want to use a single, personalized smartphone when mobile for both their business and personal contacts with “dual persona” access management and services (two addresses). In addition, they can also use a desktop device on a transient basis, using the current network address of their choice.

All this represents a significant shift in old telephony networks, but not to Internet communications, which have always been “virtual.” So, that’s what is shaking up the enterprise communications world while the migration shift slowly takes place. In the meantime, will multimodal PC “softphones” be replaced more easily by portable/mobile iPads and tablets when a bigger screen is needed for data output? How will the enterprise support such flexible mobile service with CEBP - based applications? Will the choice of mobile tablet become like the smartphones, that of the individual end users’ because of its support for personalized UC?

Variance in device screen sizes and form factors brings with it the problems of standards, impact on Operating Systems, as well as the user applications themselves. The success of Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) will be very dependent on resolving these issues, because outbound notifications and information delivery to individual end users will be based on greater (process-to-person) accessibility through user mobility.

Enterprise CIOs are already starting to look at their responsibilities for information access and delivery from both a mobility perspective, as well as from responsibilities to non- enterprise employees (business partners, customers). They all want multimodal information access, as well as multimodal, federated, contextual communication contact with appropriate people within and outside of their organization. Device independence is quickly becoming key to such flexibility and can’t be restricted to what the enterprise supplies but what it can support.

For a roundup of other major UC developments in 2010 check out the recent podcast of UC Strategies experts, particularly that on the coming role of UC tablets.

What Do You Think?

Contact me at (310) 395-2360 or at artr@ix.netcom.com

Getting Mobility In Step With UC

2010-11-04T16:19:00.002-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

November 3, 2010

Free Mobile Backup Service For End Users Also Supports “User Choice” in Communications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

While enterprises and service providers have been moving quickly to support their end users and customers with the latest and greatest UC technologies, supporting multimodal mobile devices (smart-phones) will be one of their biggest challenges. Why? Because they will be constantly evolving as devices and with their mobile OSs, must be mobile application-independent, and be highly personalized in a variety of ways.

Since mobile products and technologies are still evolving and everyone is still learning to deal with "multimodal mobility" vs. traditional desktop communications and traditional cell phones, there will be ongoing competition for different devices and associated services.

Wirefly Mobile Backup Will Help End Users Keep Up With Smartphone Evolution

Because one of the big problems with mobile devices is that they can be easily lost or stolen, end users will always need a way to easily replace what they already have. Coupled with the possibility that they may simply want to move to a new device or service, the first free, automatic, cloud-based mobile data backup service available to consumers from developer Spare Backup and Wirefly fills both bills.

Works Across Carriers, Manufacturers, and Operating Systems

Wirefly Mobile Backup supports all of the most popular smartphones in the United States, including Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, and works across all major U.S. carriers, making it incredibly easy to transfer data to a new device when switching wireless providers. In addition, the Palm, Java, Windows Phone 7 and Symbian operating systems will be supported by the end of the quarter.

Wirefly Mobile Backup can also be used to protect the data from personal computers (PC). Up to five devices including one PC can be backed up on a single free account making it easy to protect, move and share photos, music and other important information between devices.

“People come to Wirefly.com when they are thinking about changing phones or changing carriers,” said Scott Ableman, Chief Marketing Officer for Wirefly. “By offering this great service for free, Wirefly has eliminated one of the major concerns people face when making this decision.”

Cell phone users can sign up for their free Wirefly Mobile Backup account at Wirefly.com/backup or via the Android Market and iTunes App Store.

Observation: This new capability will further support "user choice" flexibility in their mobile end point devices for both business and personal use. Enterprise IT will still have to focus on controlling information access security and managing customized mobile software application clients.

ININ Pushes CaaS For Customer Contacts

2010-10-24T13:35:00.004-04:00

Copyright 2010 -The Unified-View. All rights reserved worldwide

October 24, 2010

Why Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS offering For Contact Centers Can Be A UC Winner

By Art Rosenberg

By now, you must have read some of the very positive analyst comments on Interactive Intelligence’s (ININ) Partner and Analyst conference in San Antonio, TX on October 11-13th. What was most impressive to attendees is how well-structured ININ’s contact center software applications were to cover both traditional call center and future multi-modal UC business communication needs.

What caught my attention, however, was the successful push that ININ was making in the hosted services market, they refer to as CaaS or Communications as a Service.

ININ Offers Contact Center Implementation Flexibility

The idea is now new, but ININ has taken the lead in making CaaS offerings more flexible in order to overcome the concerns of organizations that don’t know enough (yet) about whether they want to end up with a hosted contact center service or take some or all responsibility for support internally.

Given that customer interaction applications are moving into the new UC domain of “multimodal communications,” there is little internal experience available to make such a decision yet. So, the obvious approach is to “try before buy” with minimum cost and maximum flexibility.

What ININ has cleverly come up with is a VoIP integration option to start with a hosted service, but allows subsequent switching to other support alternatives based on actual experience with the specific UC applications involved.

Not surprisingly, ININ reports tremendous interest in their CaaS offering for contact center applications, particularly since they have gone out of their way to allow business organizations to retain local control over their telephony communications activities (CaaS with Local Control). This makes their offering practical for both the SMB market, as well as for larger enterprises that have larger telephone system investments to protect.

In terms of other contact center UC application functions, those are still evolving slowly but steadily, but will benefit from ININ’s “”all in one” platform philosophy for cost efficient application integrations. ININ’s approach is being enthusiastically supported by their business partners and VARs, who are focused on helping customers tailor different business applications to support both inbound and outbound multimodal customer interactions, typically managed and supported by “CRM” applications.

I am waiting to see them support the UC needs of consumers who will be using mobile smartphones for all forms of customer interactions and information services!

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Mobile UC Action From "Multimodal Notifications"

2010-09-26T13:49:00.003-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

September 26, 2010

UC and Multimodal Notifications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

UC-based, mobile, multimodal communications will be changing how people both initiate and receive contacts from other people, as well as dire3ctly from automated business process applications. While person-to-person contacts will become intelligently based upon the status and preferences of the participating parties (”presence”), the contact initiator will typically be in the driver’s seat at first. Then, based on dynamic real world considerations, the mode of communication used become based on what works for both the initiator and the individual recipient(s). Because UC also encompasses human contacts with automated applications, the mode of interaction must be dictated by the human user, regardless of how contact was initiated, with one major exception.

While great progress has been made in speach recognition as a means of data input and user interface control, it has not made completely full voice conversation practical as a user interface for self-service applications. As recognized in a new book, “Advances In Speech Recognition: Mobile Environment, Call Centers and Clinics,” speech is effcient for user input, but not practical for large ammounts of content output which can most efficiently be reviewed on a screen. That is why I see tradtional telephone self service applications (IVR) being replaced with what I call Interactive Multimodal Response (IMR) applications on all forms of multimodal endpoint devices (smart-phones, iPads, tablets, etc.)

One of the key roles that mobility and UC flexibility can play is in supporting automated business processes that can initiate contacts with individual end users for time sensitive notifications. However, I see such applications doing more that sending notication information to a user. Instead, the applications will be able to initiate an interactive multimodal exchange with the recipient, but with the choice of input and output media resting with the human recipient.

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) are going to heavily exploit such “multimodal notifications” because they can proactively initiate a self-service interaction without waiting for the recipient to take the initiative. Until now, telephony-based IVR was seen as the best way to handle self-services from consumer who, until lately, were not expected to have access to a real-time communication device other than a phone. With UC and mobile, multimodal devices, the future and value of self-services will expand significantly from online desktops and telephone IVR.

Multimodal notifications will also become another "gateway" for efficient customer care, since they will also provide the necessary context for efficient,“click-to-contact” live assistance, rather than a “blind” phone call.

Microsoft Wants To LYNC You!

2010-09-14T17:43:00.002-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

September 10, 2010

What’s In A Name? Microsoft’s Lync Wants The End Users In Business UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I was fortunate to participate in a discussion with my UC Strategies team and Microsoft about the big announcement of the next version of Office Communication Server. What was of most significance, is that Microsoft has renamed their software product (again), but, this time to one that will appeal to the individual end users, rather than to just IT management.

While UC technology infrastructure may be understandable and important to IT, the functionality of UC concepts is not so well understood by the people who should benefit most directly from using UC-based applications, the individual end users. As a result, the term “UC” means little to those potential end users, and, the integrations for UC, even less useful.

In a move to help remedy the problem of relating UC technology concepts to practical individual end user perspectives, Microsoft announced a name change for it’s latest version of its desktop Office Communications Server (OCS), which is a software platform for several real-time communication functions, including:

· Presence management (availability status information)

· Instant (text) messaging

· Conferencing

· Voice telephony

The new name, Lync, suggests not only a common process for accessing those real-time communication functions, it also implies interoperability with other forms of communication that are not “real-time.” So, as a user-oriented “gateway” to legacy telephony services, the name, “Lync,” suggests more than simple integration with traditional telephony contacts, but other multi-modal options for UC.

Microsoft Wants To “Lync” you!

To reinforce that user perspective, Microsoft suggests that “lync” can be used as a verb to better encompass what the end user can do with that particular application software tool, i.e., establish a real-time connection, in a user’s choice of ways, with a person or group of persons, if available. This flexibility will be particularly useful as users start exploiting mobile, multi-modal devices (smart-phones, iPads) and desktop “softphones.”

At this time, the Lync functionality defined for UC seems to be focused primarily on person-to-person contacts, where federated presence will be a consideration in initiating a real-time contact. However, as I have frequently stated, UC is more than that person-to-person communications, and contacts between people and automated application processes and vice versa are also part of the business communication challenge that requires the flexibility of multi-modal UC.

So, we should expect to soon see how Lync will be inter-operating with automated applications that need to initiate multi-modal “notifications” to specific individual users (CEBP), as well as how those recipients can respond to such automated, contacts. This will be of particular importance in customer-care applications that will exploit automated, time-critical, pro-active contacts for cost-efficient performance.

For now, we see Lync as a logical step forward, from an end use’s perspective, towards convenient communication flexibility and the “user’s choice” in both initiating a person-to-person contact, as well as responding to any contact from another person.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC Analytics

2010-07-08T16:03:00.008-04:00

Copyright Ó2010 -The Unified-View. All rights reserved worldwide

June 7, 2010

The Coming Importance of UC Analytics in Multi-modal Business Operations

Art Rosenberg, The Unified View

The technology convergence of all forms of business communications between people has been labeled as “unified communications” or “UC.” What it really means is that individual end-users in a business environment can now choose any form of communication to either initiate a contact with another person or group of persons, or to receive and respond to such a contact in any modality (real-time, asynchronous messaging) or medium (voice, text, visual) that is available to them.

This flexibility is defined as “multi-modal” communications, and includes “trans-modal” communications capabilities, where individual users can dynamically change from their current form of communication to another modality more suitable to their immediate situation.

More flexible communication is largely being driven by the increase in mobile communications, which requires individual users to communicate under real-time limitations of their changing personal environments. Can they talk? Can they listen? Can they look at a screen? Can they push buttons for input? Rather than wait until they can communicate in any particular way, UC enables communication tasks to be done selectively and immediately in one form or another, thus reducing the inherent latency in business communications due simply to a lack of a specific network access connection or device interface.

UC not only provides general flexibility in traditional person-to-person contacts, but, when coupled with the growing use of multi-modal mobile endpoint devices (smart-phones, iPads), also enables greater end-user access to (inbound) and from (outbound) automated self-service applications. This shift not only reduces labor costs involved with a business process through direct online access to information and proactive process-to-person “notifications” and information delivery, but also provides overall efficiencies through automated, contextual, person-to-person contacts with others involved in the business process.

With real-time federated presence information and “click-to-connect” capabilities, UC brings the communication efficiencies long found only in customer-facing contact centers to all segments of enterprise business activities, including back-office operations, branch office activities, field support, teleworkers, subject matter experts, outsourced staffing, and efficient contacts with business partner organizations involved in a common business process.

The big question now is what responsibilities does the enterprise have for evaluating and managing such expanded UC-based activities and what tools are available for doing that?

Managing Multi-modal Communications

Enterprise organizations have always had difficulty in fully understanding and separately managing different forms of location-based, business communications activity, ranging from messaging to real-time telephone calls and conferencing. UC technologies enabling greater flexibility in crossing the silo boundaries of communication applications for different types of users will only increase the complexity of communication access and activity management.

Managing various shared communication resources across different modalities of communications is something new that enterprise organizations will have to learn and understand. In particular, the sensitive area of customer contacts and interactions will be a key target for new management reporting tools (“UC Analytics”), just as it was for traditional call center telephone activities.

The detailed analytical data generated by UC activities will be applicable to a number of enterprise management responsibilities, including:

· Operational UC requirements planning - Technology infrastructure, traffic capacity, support staffing, applications design, device interfaces. This will be an ongoing challenge.

· Alternative UC implementation strategies and operational cost implications

· Traffic activity management and support – User activity, network capacities, user devices

· Operational business performance analysis - Reporting the “What” and “Who” of business processes – what people and automated applications involved in communication activities associated with key business processes actually do and how efficiently

· The “Why” of business communication activity – Capturing and analyzing key information and communication content within business processes (person-to-person contacts/process-to-person notifications/person-to-process self-services) in order to understand what is causing the communication activity

Person-to-person contacts – Basic communication between individual end users, whether internal to the organization, customer-facing, or with business partners. This will provide insights into the communication efficiencies within business process workflows.

· Speech analytics - Harnessing the voice of the customer in voice calls and messages to gain valuable insight on everything from products and processes to competitors and market opportunities

· Data analytics - Mine data associated with voice calls such as contact metrics, productivity metrics, sources of contact/response delays, etc. to uncover scenarios positively or negatively impacting process performance

· Process and desktop analytics - How desktop activity and application usage as part of person-to-person communications is contributing to or impacting task performance and business process effectiveness

· Messaging analytics - Text, speech, asynchronous, real-time notifications/delivery, access to and from real-time connections (“trans-modal communications”), etc. This also covers all “unified messaging” functions available under the “UC” umbrella, where messages (text, voice) can be dynamically converted across media, depending on the needs of the recipient not just the sender of the message.

· “Trans-modal” communication activities

· Effective use of Presence Management information for real-time contacts

· Security and privacy issues

Process-to-person contacts – Contacts between an automated business process application and specific individual users. Such users may be customer-facing staff (contact center personnel), business partners involved in a shared task, or specific customers involved in a business process.

All such users can be contacted automatically and directly by self-service applications or can initiate contacts, with a choice of modalities, to enterprise personnel through such online applications. Generally referred to as Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), such applications efficiently exploit the flexibility of UC to connect people with both self-service automated applications and/or with specific other people involved in a common business process.

UC flexibility offers the following capabilities to end-users:

· Outbound text-based “notification messages” generated by a business process application can be delivered via a choice of communication applications (Email, SMS, social network postings, etc.). Depending on the recipient’s presence status or preference, unified messaging options can convert such text-based notifications to voice messages.

· Responses from the recipient can be flexibly generated to a self-service automated application and/or selectively to appropriate qualified and available personnel in a choice of media and modalities (“Click-to-Contact”).

Business Process Analytics – UC Analytic tools can identify and evaluate all such communication activity for analysis of who, how, where, when, and why a business process has been affected by different people in the process.

· Trans-modal interfaces for time-sensitive notifications

· Proactive user contacts vs. on-demand access to applications and information

· Responsiveness of people to all forms of contact and automated notifications, which will be indicative of “accessibility” and/or “availability” and time priorities

· Such information can be used to locate and audit patterns of people-based communication delay and error in business process performance.

New model for UC activity data collection

The ability to capture and track all forms of contact activity and associated information content from personalized, user-owned, mobile, multi-modal devices (“smartphones,” iPods) is a new challenge for enterprise and IT management. This capability will require all business-related activity data from different communication applications to be collected, centralized, and consolidated for analysis and reporting.

“Business communications” will no longer be based on a specific communication device or the modality of contact, but will be focused on the identity of the contact initiator and the business relationship with the recipient. This now covers everyone who will be involved with a business process regardless if they interact with people or automated business applications. With this perspective, “UC Analytics” will be able to identify the “who,” “where,” when,” and “why” of business process performance issues.

Who should be responsible for UC Analytics?

Since UC Analytics will cover a broad range of communication activities, the responsibilities for using such analytics will vary across different operational management groups and by type of business organization. It has been reported that best results will come from using an objective business analysis group that understands the value of various performance metrics and can track those metrics to their sources.

Other aspects of UC Analytics, such as “Who” is initiating or responding to various forms of business process contacts, can be the responsibility of specific operational groups directly involved with the management of the processes in question. Contact center management of dedicated customer-facing agents and individual subject matter experts, as well as self-service applications, would be key targets for UC Analytics, as would customer relationship management (CRM) and back-office/branch oversight.

IT involvement will be useful primarily when it comes to ensuring that pertinent activity data is collected wherever it is generated and then consolidated for analyses. They will also be involved in determining the need for integration between data systems, the cost of implementation and support, and the choice of new technologies and their providers. However, line of business management must take responsibility for how the data will be used in properly evaluating operational business performance.

What’s available today? Verint takes the lead in UC Analytics

The nature of UC Analytics, which includes the performance of people involved in a business process, comes closest to traditional call center operational management tools. In fact, UC technologies can generate the greatest ROI when applied to customer services, facilitating both operational cost reduction and the generation of faster revenues from customers. This makes customer contact interactions a practical candidate for realizing maximum ROI from UC applications. However, the integration of all forms of customer communications for analytics is still evolving, e.g., social networking.

One of the leading providers of traditional call center workforce optimization technologies, Verint Systems has already started the migration of its comprehensive call center analytical tools to work in a “Customer UC” environment. This will include all forms of live assistance and automated self-service applications, not just traditional telephony and voice interactions.

Verint’s analytics-driven Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite captures a variety of information on workflow and workforce performance, including interactions with individual customers and online business process applications. By capturing customer interaction content, especially in person-to-person voice calls where important information is usually lost in the workflow process, Verint’s speech, data, customer feedback, and desktop and process analytics applications can reveal the “Why” of enterprise communications and how well, or not so well, a specific operational activity is taking place.

As pointed out by Blair Pleasant in her article, Verint has adapted its technology expertise in call center analytics for workforce performance management to provide a practical basis for UC interactions with all types of end users involved in a business process, not just call center agents and customers. This will include all enterprise staff regardless of location (back-office operations, branch office locations), as well as external staff from supply chain, field support and business partners, outsourced agent staffing, etc.

Highlighting the adaptation of these technologies that have been driving customer service people and process efficiency and effectiveness in call center environments for years, are the recent successes some organizations have had in leveraging the analytic tools to drive even wider enterprise results and process optimization. This coincides with the realization that the customer service value chain extends well beyond the call center and addressing UC interactions more broadly and holistically across the business is vital to achieving customer centricity.

For example, a Fortune 500 insurance company faced an array of challenges within its back-office life account services group, ranging from lengthy and inconsistent turnaround time to excessive overtime and considerable rework. Implementing an array of back-office solutions from Verint’s Impact 360 suite, including forecasting and scheduling, workforce management, strategic planning, performance management, and desktop and process analytics, the insurer reduced turnaround time from nine days to just six, with bill processing nearing a four-day turnaround.

Similarly, despite a significant increase in staffing, the wholesale lockbox department of a financial services firm had not experienced a commensurate increase in productivity. Partnering with Verint to determine the source of the disparity, the firm was able to identify process improvement opportunities, develop a high-level capacity plan, and create schedules that best utilized available staff skill sets. As a result, throughput increased by 11 percent, operating margins increased by 38 percent, and headcount decreased by six percent, saving the firm over $600,000 a year.

These are examples of the potential value and reach of UC Analytics. By providing insight into day-by-day or even hour-by hour incoming activity, actual throughput, and employee productivity in virtually every area of the business, key organizational stakeholders can make rapid, fact-based decisions to increase efficiency, manage time more effectively, identify flawed or inefficient processes, train staff, match staff scheduling to actual demand, and achieve service level agreements with lower costs, backlog, and overtime.

Summary

UC Analytics is still in its formative stages especially when it comes to including all key UC customer interaction data. As pointed out in Blair’s article, there are some new UC-oriented analytics that are expected beyond Verint’s current offering, including all forms of device-independent UC contact, mobile interactions, as well as all inbound and outbound self-service applications (online, IVR, IVVR), and social networking activity.

With the increase in new communication activities, there will be new sources of data for UC Analytics in the enterprise. Verint’s “open” software solution to UC Analytics can offer practical benefits to an enterprise in many areas of business operations. Its current offering provides a logical and solid first-step towards a flexible, future-proof toolset for enterprise UC activity management reporting.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Latest Contact Center Trends and UC

2010-06-07T11:39:00.009-04:00

June 7, 2010

Latest Contact Center Trends Point to “Mobile UC” Flexibility For Consumers

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As telephony evolves from legacy TDM silos to mobile, IP-based connectivity and multimodal UC interfaces, the contact center world is trying to stay on top of the changes these are bringing to traditional customer interactions. As I have frequently pointed out, “Customer UC” will be a big source of enterprise ROI because it not only helps reduce costs, but also increases customer satisfaction and revenue generation.

However, that increase will be maximized most cost-effectively when consumers exploit the flexibility and efficiencies of mobile, multimodal communication devices like the new generation of “smartphones.” Market figures already show that such smartphones are rapidly being adopted by individual end users of all types as primary endpoints for more personalized and flexible contacts.

Leading analyst firms are now starting to project key contact center market changes that new communication technologies will bring by surveying customer organization perspectives about their technology migration plans from legacy TDM telephony that has dominated contact center activities in the past. The results of a recent market study by Frost & Sullivan was promoted by Interactive Intelligence at their Global User Forum last month to show the new directions that contact centers will be taking. The study “highlights” confirm that customer contact centers will be exploiting the benefits of UC to achieve individual “customer satisfaction,” as well as new, more flexible and cost-effective technology implementations through hosted network services.

Highlights of Frost & Sullivan North American Customer Survey

· Customer satisfaction back as a top priority – A full 50 percent of respondents were profiled as “customer-oriented,” with 35 percent profiled as seeking the “latest and greatest” applications, and the remaining 15 percent profiled as “cost-focused.”

· Growth of hosted services; increasing adoption by large contact centers – The fastest growing segment for hosted contact center adoption were respondents representing contact centers with more than 500 seats (from 35 percent in 2009, to 47 percent in 2010); among all size segments, a total of 30 percent indicated they would use hosted services in 2010, up from 24 percent in 2009.

· Rapid growth of social media customer interactions– Of respondents surveyed, 30 percent indicated they support social media customer activity and interactions on external social media sites (facebook, twitter, etc.), and 29 percent indicated they monitor and extract intelligence from this activity; of social media benefits, the top three cited were to “provide better customer service,” (75 percent), “drive sales,” (58 percent), and “drive customer loyalty” (54 percent).

· Growth of Web collaboration, text and video – Of supported inbound interaction channels, growth from 2009 to 2010 was highest for text/SMS (25 percent increase), video (15 percent increase), and Web-based interactions (8 percent increase).

· Consistent customer experience across channels continues to be a high priority across industries – The largest majority of respondents – 67 percent – rated ensuring consistent service across channels as a “very high priority” or “high priority.”

· Significant increase in proactive customer contact activity across industries – Of three types of outbound customer programs, the majority -- 65 percent -- indicated they would increase their “proactive, value-add customer contact” programs over the next two years; 43 percent said they would increase their “sales and marketing” programs, and 42 percent said they would increase their “collections” programs.

Why Multimodal Mobility Is Key To Efficient UC Customer Contacts

As I have frequently pointed out, UC flexibility is designed to support end user needs as either contact initiators or as contact recipients/respondents (Inbound/Outbound contacts). To maximize customer contact accessibility, an individual end user must be able to either initiate or respond to a business notification anywhere, anytime and in any modality.

Mobile access, coupled with UC interface options, offers just such flexibility and control for efficient communication contact with individual customers. Without mobility and UC, customers are stuck with the old limitations of location-based communications and no alternatives for selectively communicating under different environmental circumstances.

With traditional cell phones, mobility was provided, but only for a voice-based connection. Mobile users in particular are often limited in using voice, not only because of their “availability” to talk, but also because of privacy and ambient noise issues. Furthermore, when customers are contacted by an automated business process application, voice conversations are not as appropriate or efficient as a visual interchange (text, graphics).

While speech is efficient for simple user inputs, it is less so for information output. This is particularly important for the expected increase in proactive customer contact activity confirmed by the Frost and Sullivan study. Accordingly, UC flexibility is particularly strategic to mobile, self-service business applications, that can also be initiated by automated business process applications, better known as CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes).

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Making UC Universally Interoperable

2010-05-19T04:21:00.002-04:00

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

May 18, 2010

UCIF to Do More Than Come Up With UC Infrastructure Standards

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Citing the need to fully leverage customers’ investments in communications systems and unite their global organizations, five global technology companies today joined to form the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), an alliance dedicated to enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications (UC) interoperability. HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech / LifeSize, and Polycom, seek to unify the vibrant but fragmented UC ecosystem through this shared mission.

Unified Communications (UC) is complex because it represents a variety of different ways to make timely contact and communicate with people. Although, UC functionality is very software based, the multiplicity of UC-related technologies can’t all be provided by a single software developer. From an interoperability perspective, the number of technology standards needed to cover all the flexibility that UC interactions require are too many and too complex to define or implement easily.

Payoff of Interoperability

Obviously, both the technology definitions and concept perspectives of UC are important, but what is most critical is enabling all kinds of end users to benefit from having communication flexibility and efficiencies in their choice of contact and user interfaces. That flexibility of choice is now becoming increasingly critical because it is becoming the multimodal gateway to personal and efficient personal accessibility, due to the rapid adoption of mobile “smartphones.”

This choice will soon be universally available to all kinds of users, whether a “user” is initiating a new contact or responding as a recipient of a contact initiated by someone else, including a “proactive,” automated business application process (CEBP). It also should make little difference as to who the end user is – enterprise staff, business partner, or consumer/customer.

In fact, we see one of the biggest payoffs of UC will be the ability for individual users to exploit the use of mobile smartphones to be more accessible and interact directly on a personalized basis with any automated business process application. For all of this flexibility to be realized, on an end-to-end basis from any endpoint device with UC multimodal flexibility, there has to be universal interoperability across all UC infrastructure components that may be involved. The problem is that there are not enough infrastructure standards (yet) to cover the interoperability complexities of UC usage.

Benefits For UC Growth

Up till now, it has not only been difficult to describe what “UC” really means, but also, when it came time to plan an implementation of UC, there were no standards that could be used for selecting UC technology components and services. The various communication applications like IM, social networking, UM, and CEBP applications, were not really organized to be easily implemented and integrated wherever desired on an application design or end user basis. As a result, the promises of UC providing benefits to individual users (UC-U) or to business application processes (UC-B) were “blowing in the wind!”

With an “open,” cooperative group of leading industry providers and objective industry experts taking charge of organizing all the elements of UC, things like:

· Terminology and definitions
· Identifying interoperability needs and priorities for both real-time and asynchronous testing and certification
· Establishing easy to use interoperability testing and certification procedures
· Structuring the UC framework so that there will be a clear and objective differentiation of functional roles for UC-based applications
· Coordinating UC standards with standards of other communication applications
· Establishing appropriate metrics for evaluating various levels of benefits from implementing UC capabilities in different ways
· Support a common UC ecosystem that will subsume and not conflict with other standards-based technologies
· Etc.
can now become better structured for practical implementation planning for the technology providers, the market, the individual end users, the service providers, and the enterprise IT support staff.

We can expect the UCIF to help break the gridlock that currently exists between the communication technologies of the future and existing technologies that still work. This will benefit all individual end users and the applications they use, as well as business organizations of any size that must support specific application needs for those end users.

Opening The Doors to Mobile UC Services

It is well recognized that UC flexibility has its greatest payoffs to end users who are mobile and will be using a variety of multimodal “smart-phones.” In addition to helping to define all the necessary standards that the full spectrum of UC functionality will require, the UCIF can also provide an operational framework that will facilitate ongoing interoperability testing and certification of any UC software technology product or service.

This UCIF facility will be very useful to help drive and support new hosted and “cloud-based” UC applications, as well as to help expand “open” interoperability between Mobile UC services. The latter is particularly strategic, since the wireless carriers still seem to be trying to lock in dominance over their customer endpoint devices and associated mobile applications. Wireless mobility at the individual end user level must be a basic modality option for the UC framework.

Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) Formation Announced

In response to the critical need to make all UC applications more “open,” across the UC network infrastructure framework, and to satisfy a consistent UC “experience” for all individual end users, the formation of a new, “open alliance” of technology leaders involved with developing various UC technologies and services, was announced today. Named the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), the group is open to membership by any organization that is developing UC technologies and is interested in supporting interoperability with other UC technologies.

Jim Burton, of UCStrategies.com, noted that:
“Even though vendors work hard to follow standards, standards are open to interpretation and it creates interoperability problems. The UCIF will help solve those problems by providing a venue for testing and working with other companies to ensure that products are interoperable before they’re delivered to a customer.”

“By working together, the UCIF will help make the UC market grow sooner than it would otherwise, with each vendor now able to get their share of a larger pie.”

The founding members have been joined by a growing roster of member companies including Acme Packet, Aspect, AudioCodes, Broadcom, BroadSoft, Brocade, ClearOne, Jabra, Plantronics, RADVISION, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Teliris. It is still early in the game, so many of the important UC players have not yet publicized their intentions, but it is clear that for the UC market to move forward, ALL the serious players will have to participate and cooperate in this common goal.

For more details on UCIF membership participation, you can get more information and objective insights by UC Strategies experts at www.ucstrategies.com.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Here Come the UC Solution Integrators

2010-04-20T11:33:00.003-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

April 20, 2010

Helping “UC Solution Integrators” Succeed In The Marketplace Beyond IP Telephony

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Introduction
Unified Communications (UC) is a term that is displacing “business communica-tions” because it is a concept and technology approach that integrates user inter-faces to support all forms of real-time and asynchronous contact and interaction with people involved in a business process. It is slowly replacing stand-alone business telephony technologies, integrating voice and text-based information. UC is particularly important in mobile environments, where the end user inter-faces, both for initiating or receiving a contact, must work flexibly and efficiently within the context of a business process, for each individual user’s needs at the moment.

As a result, the trend towards implementation of UC capabilities is opening new opportunities for traditional technology sales and support channels to assist business organizations in planning and implementing their individual migration from legacy telephone communications to integrated UC capabilities.

The key to success in this convergence will be strategic business partnerships with leading infrastructure technology providers and developers, established communications software and service providers, as well as application designers and implementation specialists that can work together to support all aspects of an integrated UC operational environment. UCStrategies calls such UC Business Partners “Solution Integrators.”

One major communication software provider, IBM, describes its UC strategy as being based on four pillars: an open end extensible platform capable of integrating with most leading collaboration and telephony products, technical expertise, industry knowledge and experience and, last but not least, a healthy ecosystem of business partners. IBM relies on business partners or Solution Integrators to build UC solutions on top of its UC platform and to provide the integrated functionality customers require. And, because IBM Sametime software integrates out of the box with many Microsoft productivity applications, solutions integrators of a wide variety of backgrounds can find new opportunities. IBM provides those partners with access to the technical expertise and integration tools they need to succeed, providing the added UC integration expertise that is lacking in most internal IT organizations, while giving business partners a key role in one of IBM's newest segments of its software business.

In order to recognize the enterprise business sweet spots for UC, it is important for every UC Business Partner or Solution Integrator to fully understand all operational perspectives and priorities for the different benefits that UC will bring to a business organization. This includes individual end user needs for communications and interactions with people both inside and outside the organization. Any UC solutions implemented for today’s modes of communication must also be ”future proofed’” for tomorrow’s communications.

Telephony Integrations – one of the key starting points for UC

Today’s enterprise UC migrations typically start with enabling more efficient and effective ways to initiate real-time phone contacts with other people, both inside or outside of any size organization. This may be done “contextually” from “click-to-call” information, coupled with availability information (presence), in a personal contact directory, provided through messaging contacts (email, IM, voice mail, SMS, etc.), or for selective access to live assistance within automated, self-service business process applications (Web, IVR applications).

Cost efficient, SIP-based IP Telephony that can integrate easily with other UC communication applications, is slowly but surely replacing legacy TDM PBX telephone systems. A big obstacle in migrating any organization to a UC environment is the challenge of ripping and replacing the many existing and expensive telephone systems that still function effectively for person-to-person voice conversations. Integrating existing telephony investments with business process applications and other UC communication applications software (email, voice mail, conferencing, IM, telephony presence, SMS, social networking, and mobile, etc.) has become a short-term target for UC payoffs.

IBM has made a concerted effort to bring its Business Partners on board to help integrate their customers into a UC services environment. There is a range of services business partners can provide. The greatest customer value – and the greatest revenue opportunity for business partners resides in - first, improving business processes with horizontal unified communications services and, ultimately, UC-enabling specific business processes in vertical industry application scenarios.

What’s The Opportunity For UC Business Partners?

The evolving UC capabilities and technologies provide new opportunities and challenges to enterprises. Because most enterprise IT organizations typically have neither the evolving knowledge and experience for integrating converging legacy telephony with other UC technologies, they need lots of hands-on help to even start moving forward with migrations to real UC solutions. In addition to the challenge of integrating and interoperating with legacy telephony systems, most UC solutions will include:

• All forms of messaging and multimodal endpoints (“unified messaging”)

• All forms of voice and video conferencing

• Integrations with business process applications (CEBP)

Business organizations, large or small, will need hands-on support for planning, configuring, installing, integrating, and UC-enabling all the hardware and software pieces in the UC solution picture. This can’t happen overnight because UC technology elements are still evolving and slowing the migration from legacy telephony silos. There are a variety of ongoing issues that enterprises need help with from Solution Integrators due to the nature of UC solutions:

• Existing communication technology investments still work and need to be included when appropriate in the day-to-day operations.

• UC is not a not a single product, but rather a set of interoperable communication capabilities that may be distributed differently among a variety of commu-nication facilities.

• Implementation priorities will vary from organization to organization, especially in terms of business process functionalities and priorities, then may change as business activities change.

• End users, from both inside and outside of an organization, will need some training in the effective use of basics of UC communication functions, as well as in specific business process applications that are customized for specific UC situations and end user situations.

• New mobile endpoint devices and interface designs will play a large role for enterprise application implementations.

• Communication technologies will need many, selective technology integrations with business applications.

• Such integrations will require strong partnerships and implementation planning/coordination.
These are all areas that UC solution providers must take responsibility for dealing with in helping customers implement UC applications. The question then becomes how will UC Solution Integrators gain that expertise?

What IBM Has To Offer UC Business Partners

The voice or telephony industry is changing drastically. In looking for a strategic partner, UC Solution Integrators or Business Partners have to start thinking about the end results that their customers are really looking for long term, which may require skills that the Solution Integrator doesn’t currently have now. Solution Integrators in the UC arena, particularly those who specialize in voice communications, need to partner with leading providers of integration technology that provide robust and flexible integration platforms to help customers extract more value from what they already have and to give Solution Integrators the technological springboard to help those customers evolve new UC applications when they're ready.

Because of its heavy experience with standards-based, open software, along with its strong role in developing messaging and application software, IBM is well positioned to assist its business partners move into the various areas of UC, especially in the business process perspective of UC activities.

IBM provides the necessary platforms and tools to enable Business Partners to easily develop and integrate customized, but flexible, business process UC applications. In addition to its UC platform offerings, notably Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony, IBM provides a range of tools for its Business Partners, includ-ing:

• Comprehensive Integration Software Tools – Toolsets for designing and im-plementing customized, applications with voice and visual interfaces for both desktop and mobile endpoint devices.

• UC Experience and Training – Experience is what UC Business Partners re-quire in order to help their customers move forward with practical UC imple-mentations, and IBM is clearly experienced in using its own technologies inter-nally. IBM also provides opportunities for partnering with other IP telephony Business Partners and specialists in order to provide comprehensive UC com-ponent solutions. In addition, IBM offers integration training, market training, and end user UC interface training.

Practical Steps to become a UC Solutions Integrator/Business Partner:

UC is not a single product or application and evolves from the support and partici-pation of different application specialist skills. UC will become an ongoing source of business from existing customers as UC software technology continually changes to match specific evolving customer needs. The following are steps that are recommended for potential UC Solutions Integrators:

1. Identify your current “expertise” within the technologies of UC, e.g., business process analysis, applications (telephony, IVR, contact center, etc.), IP telephony integration, business process integration, mobility;

2. Identify customer UC needs and associated skill requirements;

3. Learn additional UC skills required by your customers, or

4. Partner with others who already qualify in those other skills; and

5. Develop your additional skills as needed, leveraging the UC resources avail-able at UCStrategies.com, or from specific vendors. For example, IBM’s Partnerworld is an excellent place for IBM partners to help grow their businesses.

As the UC industry changes, so too do the skills for Solution Integrators and Business Partners. Working with vendor companies that provide these partners with the tools they need to succeed is crucial. As a sponsor of UCStrategies’ UC Summit, IBM is investing in helping its partners prosper.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC Meets CEBP

2010-04-18T14:15:00.003-04:00

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

April 14, 2010

UC Is More Than “Person-to-Person” Contacts – Think “Proactive Self-service Applications!”

By Art Rosenberg

The telephone brought the power of real-time voice connections to people in distributed business operations, but with today’s UC capabilities, voice is just one of the options for both real-time and non-real-time contacts for both business and social contacts.

Conversational voice phone calls, however, also maintained the need for live assistance to be involved with exchanging information and manually completing business real-time transactions. Although self-service applications could be implemented using a Touch-tone telephone keypad and speech output, the voice user interface, as well as any information, had to be kept very simple. In the growing Internet world of self-service online information access, speech can only be used for simple outputs. More complex or voluminous data still need the efficiencies of stored text and visual graphics.

In order to fully exploit the power of automation self-services to a business process, the business process itself must be able to initiate real-time contacts with people, rather than simply wait for a person (customer, partner) to make the first move. The flexibility of mobile devices, coupled with UC’s “click-to-call” and unified messaging capabilities, will enable time-sensitive automated applications to proactively initiate timely business contacts (notifications) and associated self-service applications, with people, without the necessity and expense of live assistance required by voice interfaces alone.

CEBP and “Click-to-Contact” Assistance

UC’s presence-based “click-to-call” options can provide access to voice or visual conversational live assistance “on demand” in any automated application, regardless of how the application was initiated. This makes such applications more useful to a greater variety of application processes and the various end users of those applications. More importantly, UC facilities, integrated with Communications Enabled Business Process applications (CEBP), can significantly expand opportunities to automate business processes involving customers and customer-facing staff. This will reduce operational costs, improve operational performance, and speed up revenue generation.

The real benefit and the potential for true competitive advantages resides in striking the right balance between the pieces of a business process that can—and should—be automated whenever possible, and those where human judgment and intervention, on demand, can guarantee the best outcome.

This will be particularly valuable for automating more accessible and flexible self-service business processes with mobile and personalized, handheld smartphone devices. Integrating them with CEBP and UC options, rather than keeping them limited by the inefficiencies of inbound voice calls and traditional Telephone User Interfaces (TUI) of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications for information output, will expand the role of self-services and minimize the need and costs for live voice assistance.

This is the “hot spot” where data technology providers like IBM and Microsoft will be exploiting UC integrations with voice connections.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Congratulations, VoiceCon!

2010-03-23T20:37:00.003-04:00

Copyright 2010 (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

Finally – VoiceCon Changes It’s Name!

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Ever since the “UC” concept started to gain traction in business communications, I had been bugging Fred Knight to let go of the emphasis on voice telephony reflected in the name of their very successful “VoiceCon” conference. I also was suggesting that enterprise text messaging technology providers like Microsoft and IBM bring their customers to this show to start delivering a common technology message of convergence, flexibility, and UC interoperability to the market place.

Well, today, on the 20th anniversary of VoiceCon, they announced a name change at the show to “Enterprise Connect.” To learn more, go to www.voicecon.com/is-enterpriseconnect.

This simple name change will help open business communication doors wider to include more than a flexible choice of person-to-person voice/video or messaging connections, but to also include “application process-to-person” and “person-to-application process” contacts that exploit the efficiencies of automated (self-service) business processes across all forms of communication interfaces.

Maybe we will see the next name change take us from the real-time traffic-centric label of VoiceCon’s popular blog site, “No Jitter,” to something more pertinent to the UC vision of flexible, interoperable, multimodal user interfaces.

Congratulations on the name change!

IP Telephony Dependent on UC, Mobility, and CEBP Apps

2010-03-21T16:00:00.005-04:00

Copyright 2010 (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

UC, Mobility, and CEBP Integrations Driving IP Telephony Implementations
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The industry press has been filled with recent reports about Nortel customers being faced with the challenge of having their legacy Nortel phone systems converted to future Avaya systems. Avaya appears to have done a good job of taking on the responsibilities of an incumbent telephony provider by quickly laying out a PBX migration plan for them to do so cost effectively.

However, what Nortel customers are really facing reflects what all enterprise organizations are dealing with today. That is, the new role of “intelligent,” software-based IP Telephony as a foundational component of mobile, multimodal unified communications (UC) that integrate with enterprise applications to “optimize business process performance” and effectiveness.

The question that Nortel and other customers really must answer is this: Can your incumbent telephone system provider help deliver new, UC-based IP Telephony “applications” that will be used by your next generation staff, customers and business partners? Furthermore, is your communications infrastructure flexible enough to adapt and integrate with your industry’s standard business applications now and in the future?

Partnering IP Telephony with Mobile Web Services and Online Applications

To meet these ever-evolving demands by the next-generation end user, Web services and online applications have since jumped in to improve visual interactive application access at the PC desktop. However, until the advent of handheld broadband smartphones, such efficient solutions have not been conveniently available for use when users are mobile and away from a desktop PC. Needless to say, consumers were thus left out in the cold until now for improved and more efficient automated customer care based upon visual self-service application interfaces!

UC is not just a matter of making the costs of telephony cheaper, but also of making voice communications selectively more effective and complementary to other forms of visual and text-based communications and information access. This is where new UC capabilities like presence management, coupled with “click-to-call” capabilities, will make voice and video conversations and conferencing efficient supplements to the many forms of real-time text messaging (IM, SMS) and information exchange that are now available to consumers.

The new responsibilities for business communications and operational interactions must include the different business process application needs of end users from both inside and outside of the organization (business partners and customers). So, the real challenge for both large and small businesses is how to exploit all the pieces of UC, including IP Telephony applications, cost efficiently.

Mobility Will Become a Big Influencer For CEBP Integration

Mobile accessibility is not only a big factor for enabling UC flexibility for traditional person-to-person contacts via voice or text, but it will also facilitate application process-to-person and person-to-application process contacts that can exploit real-time, multi-media exchanges between people and information from automated self-service applications. In addition to being able to make immediate contact with mobile users, and, depending upon the person’s situation and information content, the choice of visual or voice application interface can also be dynamically determined by the individual users.

Automated business process applications that can effectively initiate any kind of direct communication contact with a person can efficiently replace the expense and delays that result from requiring humans to perform such contact tasks via phone calls. Such capability has been labeled as a “Communication Enabled Business Process” or CEBP and is of particular value where time-sensitive situations have to be dealt with immediately. It is useful to quickly and automatically notify people of an urgent problem or as a reminder to take action to avoid problems, and get immediate confirmation feedback as well, e.g., reminders for taking medications, an appointment, flight change notifications, etc.

Mobile, multimodal smartphones will now enable customer care contacts to be more automated, while still allowing flexible, on-demand customer access (“click-to-call”) to live assistance (voice, chat), whenever necessary. Again, ”contextual” access to available live assistance can be efficiently provided on-demand, based on the dynamic needs of the customer and qualified resource availability.

“Different Strokes for Different Folks?” Software-based Architecture for Mobile UC Flexibility!

End users, whether enterprise employees or consumers will no longer be satisfied with the limitations of the legacy telephone user interface, and will start exploiting the benefits of UC flexibility and integrated visual and voice user interfaces. Now that consumers have had a taste of multimodal mobility with innovative smartphones, they are starting to expect freedom of choice in how they initiate and receive contacts from both people and business process applications.

The key to extending communication flexibility and interoperability will rest with making communication applications functionally software-based, hardware independent, and with standards-based open interoperability. That requirement is particularly applicable for the increased use of new mobile smartphones that are already being used to communicate with all kinds of mobile applications under varying user circumstances.

Whether a user is initiating a contact or is the recipient accepting a contact, the choice of how a UC contact is made will depend upon each individual’s circumstantial situation.

· Sometimes contact is requested with a specific individual vs. anyone who is qualified, accessible, and available

· Sometimes the contact required is an immediate voice conversation

· Sometimes a user can’t talk (noisy, privacy)

· Sometimes they can’t hear (noisy)

· Sometimes they need to send information to be viewed in the context of a voice conversation

· Sometime a user can’t read or type (driving)

· Sometimes the response to an asynchronous message requires a voice conversation, real-time IM exchange, or a change in the message medium.

One Example of Telephony Providers Responding To UC Change

Leading telephony system providers recognize that the flexibility of communication interfaces is becoming critical, and they are converging their new IP Telephony offerings with other text-based communications. One example of this is NEC.

According to Jay Krauser, General Manager of Sales Support and Engineering, NEC Corporation of America:
“The users we are developing products for today may use texting more than voice and email combined. They’ve used any number of social networking and online collaborative tools for many years. They’re tech-savvy and mobile, and whatever business user interfaces we put in their hands need to fit a highly evolved work style.”

As an example, Krauser referenced a hospital setting where the software-based communications infrastructure integrates with patient data using the HL7 standard to give workers in any role - operator, administrator, nurse or doctor - access to the clinical, financial or other administrative data quickly and on-the-go. Automating notifications to mobile devices to advise clinical staff of a change in patient status ultimately speeds patients through diagnosis and treatment to where they’d rather be, which is home.

NEC put its IP Telephony technology where its mouth is when the company announced last month that its software-based Unified Communications platform, Sphericall, is fully integrated with IBM’s Lotus Foundations platform. When installed, it is literally a part of IBM’s software package and shares resources with IBM’s text messaging applications.

This is a step forward in integrating all the key communication applications of UC together as a single, interoperable product set. NEC’s other major partner, Microsoft, is also a candidate for such close-knit interoperability through its Exchange server for email and unified messaging and its OCS Office Communications Server for Instant Messaging, presence management, and unified conferencing.
Who Will You Trust To Provide New UC-based IP Telephony Applications?

It should be pretty obvious that UC functionality that includes more than traditional person-to-person voice contacts will require new, heavy-duty capabilities from the other technology providers involved. Those new technology offerings are still evolving, so reputation and direction must be part of your evaluation. Because the various UC technologies involved are generally developed by different suppliers, there will be different combinations of UC software applications available as alternative solutions.

1. UC will depend heavily on text-based interfaces for both messaging and application information, so the two big players in the business email and IM industry, Microsoft and IBM, will have to be part of the team that can offer customers a complete UC solution. Their offerings will be most important for UC integrations for presence management, unified messaging, CEBP, etc.

2. Well-established, experienced, IP Telephony providers who can offer both a new software-based platform along with integration capabilities to work with a variety of existing PBX and IPBX systems, will be a safe bet for implementing a new IP Telephony solution.

3. Traditional contact center capabilities will have to be accommodated with what I have labeled as “Customer UC” functions, which provides increased contact and interaction flexibility for customers who will exploit multimodal smartphones.

4. While legacy IVR solutions were very limited in their role of self-service applications, providers, who have already exploited them innovatively in the context of Vertical Market applications, will most likely be able to use their experience more effectively within the expanded context of a multimodal mobile smartphone environment.

5. Future-proofing an IP Telephony investment will require that it be based upon open industry standards, support for mobile device independence, and integration with third-party business process applications. These will support communication innovation that the next generation of users of IP Telephony and UC will require.

6. With the move of IP Telephony into a software-based environment, it has opened the door to providers who can also offer the use of that software as a hosted service (SaaS) or, in the case of communication services (CaaS). That option is rapidly gaining traction in the UC marketplace and can provide an alternative mode of implementation with lower capex costs and greater opex flexibility.

Will Your Incumbent Telephony Provider Be Able to Deliver Your UC-based IP Telephony Applications?

In planning your move to the future of mobile, UC-based IP Telephony applications, it may be questionable whether a traditional telephony provider is really ready to tackle the fast-moving new demands of multimodal and transmodal Mobile UC self-service applications required by your customers. One new source of technology for telephony applications is based on using speech to simplify end user information input, but using speech recognition to convert it to text, which is more efficient for application processing, storage, retrieval and user interface management. For this reason, it will be appropriate to consider other reputable technology providers who are moving more quickly to deliver innovative UC solutions that will support voice with speech recognition as application inputs, but also exploit visual output for practical online user interface efficiencies.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Getting UC Payoff Faster With Hosted IP Telephony

2010-03-17T12:55:00.002-04:00

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

March 5, 2010

Getting UC Payoff Fast With Hosted IP Telephony For Both Internal Users and Customers
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

A recent enterprise market study confirmed that customer-related business processes have the most important priorities for UC capabilities. This means that any communications involving either customer-facing staff or customers directly (self-services) will benefit the enterprise the most from UC flexibility. It makes little difference how or where the communication services are provided to the different end users, but ultimately, cost will be an influence.

By now, everyone understands that traditional business telephone voice applications are slowly but surely becoming an integrated part of multi-modal “unified communications” (UC) for both enterprise users and customer interactions. This means shifting legacy TDM network connections to SIP-based VoIP networks, software-based call management (IP Telephony), and exploiting multimodal endpoint devices on the desktop (e.g., PC “softphones”) and mobile “smart-phones.”

Initiating and receiving phone calls through UC will not only exploit more efficient and contextual visual user interfaces, e.g., presence-based “click-to-call”, but will also enable business process automated applications to initiate real-time notifications to people and support self-service transactions in the recipient’s interface of choice. This flexibility will be particularly important as consumers and business users increasingly adopt personalized, mobile “smart-phones” for faster, flexible modes of contact accessibility. All of this software-based flexibility, however, means greater technology complexity, which is increasingly difficult and expensive to support with traditional in-house IT resources, especially when software products will be constantly changing and evolving.

The biggest challenge for enterprise organizations migrating to such a UC environment, will be to change their existing telephony systems and voice applications to integrate seamlessly and device-independently with other UC components such as email, unified messaging (UM), Instant Messaging, presence management, communications enabled business processes (CEBP), social networking, and mobile network services.

How To Get Going Fast With Minimal Cost? - Hosted Services!

As everyone will tell you, migrating the enterprise to UC is a “journey.” That means you have to selectively prioritize which business processes and which end users (staff, customers) should be implemented first with UC capabilities. Since we are talking about changing existing business processes through new communication facilities, it will be important to “pilot” such redesigned applications first, before going operationally across the enterprise.

Fortunately, because IP Telephony is now software-based and accessible over the Internet, it has joined other business process applications in becoming easily available as a hosted or managed service that can be used to replace or supplement legacy premise-based TDM telephone systems and call center technologies. IP Telephony service is labeled as “Communications as a Service” (CaaS) and is becoming a key starting point for hosted UC services.

The proven benefits of any hosted telephony service usually include:
· No capital expense, controllable operational expenses based on actual usage/need, operational management controls over usage

· Selective use of UC applications features, including IP Telephony, for either internal users, partners, or customers

· Centralizes management and support for multiple site locations. Does not require adding in-house IT expertise to maintain new applications. This will be especially useful where there are different communication technologies being used at different site locations.

· Enables new contact center applications to be developed and activated within only a few weeks or months, depending on the level of integration and customization required, compared to traditional, location-based implementations.

· Integrates with and supplements existing enterprise communication technologies (e.g., PBXs, Microsoft OCS, Email, IM, mobile and wireless services, etc.)

· Integration with on-site business process applications

· Exploits efficient SIP networking architecture overlay

· Provides centralized backup survivability for individual locations

· Supports all necessary user interfaces required by different end users

· Applications can be easily and dynamically implemented and changed as needed

· Flexible payment plans for on-demand usage

· Option to move hosted technology on-premise for either managed support service or for full internal support

Because of the obvious benefits of hosted and managed software applications, all large technology and service providers are starting to offer such services instead of traditional software and system sales. The question now becomes one of who should be your hosted service provider?

Who Can Best Support Your Hosted Applications?

Because the IP network has now become critical for multi-modal access to all centralized, “cloud-based” applications, it is easy to fall into the trap of expecting network providers to also support your business process applications as if they were simple phone connections. Network service providers who offer hosted or managed applications are really “resellers,” who themselves can’t directly provide the necessary application support that the original application developers can offer.

When it comes to application developers who might now be directly offering hosted application services, even there you have to look at the level of integration they provide for interoperability between the different applications and the different end users involved. In particular, UC for internal business users doesn’t really do much for customer needs, or what I have labeled as “Customer UC.” The latter will provide special UC facilities for customer-facing personnel, including agents (in-house, home), subject matter “experts,” mobile sales and field support staff, and customer contact operational management. This will also include all flavors of inbound and outbound contacts for customer self-service applications, automated notifications, and multi-modal access to live assistance (real-time and "as-soon-as-possible").

The developers of a hosted application are the best source for the hosted service because of the following considerations:

· The Developer already owns the solution and can more rapidly provide/add applications when needed

· The Developer owns the code and can fix bugs more rapidly

· The Developer can provide superior support since they know the products inside and out.

· A telecom service provider relies upon its relationship to the original Developer (Avaya, Nortel, etc.) for updates, bug fixes, troubleshooting, etc.

· A telecom service provider can usually only provide a subset of a product’s feature set, since it typically only wants to support the most common set of features that applies to the broadest possible audience

The challenge for enterprise organizations is to find a specialized IP Telephony and Contact Center technology developer that can also provide maximum flexibility in its hosted services offerings.

Interactive Intelligence Has “All-in-One” Integration Head-start on Hosted UC

Back in 1997, Interactive Intelligence introduced the first open, “all-in-one” communications software platform that integrated all telephony applications. They supplement or replace traditional PBXs with their value-add telephony applications for both business users and for customer interactions. More recently, they moved up the food chain to provide software tools for creating business process work flow applications that integrate tightly with their communication applications.

Interactive Intelligence now offers their open “all-in-one” software applications as a hosted service, which will enable enterprise organizations that are looking for a hosted solution to benefit from the tight integration between communication applications that has already been implemented. By virtue of its open architecture, and their basic SIP-based Interaction Center Platform, Interactive Intelligence is well prepared to quickly support any and all business communication application needs of their hosted service customers.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Is Everything Mobile Going To Be A "Phone?"

2010-02-16T04:20:00.001-05:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

Windows Phone 7

I am somewhat surprised that the name given by Microsoft to its new mobile operating system platform is a "phone.'” After all, the term "phone" comes from the Greek word for "voice." The word “telephone” means "far voice." Just because the mobile device/system will handle voice applications, in addition to visual data, doesn't make it just a "phone!"

But maybe because Apple took the lead in calling their multimedia device the "iPhone," everything that can also handle voice applications will have "phone" in its name.

Of course, voice is just a piece of the “unified communications" picture, which enables application speech interfaces as well as real-time contextual voice contacts with people. But various forms of real-time text messaging are already replacing traditional phone calls, especially by online self-service applications that need timely contact with a specific person.

So, it’s really not just about voice coming into play here, but other mobile user interfaces as well!

Mobile UC and Customer Interactions

2010-01-24T12:14:00.003-05:00

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
January 23, 2010

Customer UC + Smartphones + CEBP = UC-B and UC-U Enterprise Payoffs

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The bottom line payoff for UC-based business communications has been widely promoted as optimizing business process performance through communications efficiency and flexibility or “UC-B.” While there are also direct benefits to individual end users (UC-U) in terms of their productivity, the reality is that the more you can automate a business process and the less you need to depend on people to be part of the business process, the more efficient that process can be. (In the real world, however, we really can’t automate everything all the time!)

With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise action-takers, and automated business applications will be increasing significantly. What that means is that both automated self-service applications and access to live assistance can be initiated by either a business process or by a customer, and the real-time medium of communication can selectively be combinations of “click-to-call” voice conversations, “Push-to-talk” (voice message exchange), online application interactions, or text messaging (IM, SMS). (Social networking might now also be part of the interaction game.)

The “Apps Store” concept of wireless service providers can be extended to enterprise portals to facilitate individual consumer access to various mobile customer applications, while at the enterprise end, an automated business process can monitor the status of application metrics and proactively initiate a personalized customer contact with a choice of user interfaces based on accessibility (device, Presence status) or user preference.

I see CEBP getting the most mileage out of mobile online applications and proactive “process-to-person” multimodal notifications, (authorized, of course), both coupled with “click-for assistance” (choice of IM or voice connection). Such contacts will be more “intelligent” and efficient because they will be multimodal and contextually initiated, based on the information source used by the customer for contact initiation or the business application that exploits CEBP. It won’t be just their identity as a caller or the location they call from.

If we are looking at UC-B business process benefits as the major justification for implementing UC, we obviously must highlight customer contacts and interactions as a key target for UC flexibility because that is where revenue and profit come from (in addition to cost savings). Accordingly, as consumer adoption of personalized mobile smartphones increases, the old enterprise voice-based customer call center game has to change to multimodal live and self-service interactions as well.

Hello proactive “IVVR” applications! (Interactive Voice-Visual Response)

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Business Users Want Their Own Smartphones For Both Company and Personal Use

2010-01-13T11:09:00.003-05:00

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
January 10, 2010

Business Users Will Want Their Own Mobile “Smart-phones” For Consumer UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

With all the announcements about mobile “smartphones” at last week’s 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, I was glad to see the recent smartphone survey by Forrester Research aimed at mobile business end users (“information workers” or “iWorkers”), who are also “consumers.” They will be the key users of converged UC applications because of the multimodal flexibility demands of mobile users, who can’t always talk, hear, look or type to communicate. The survey results confirm our view that not only must enterprise UC support these popular mobile devices, but those mobile devices will be chosen by and paid for, if necessary, by the individual end users.

It also means that a single, multimodal smartphone device will have to support “dual persona” usage, i.e., treating the same individual differently as a consumer than as a business user or enterprise employee. The former enables personal contacts and services including entertainment, while the latter will apply appropriate priorities for business contacts and applications controllable by an enterprise.

With business applications and information access moving into Internet “cloud” servers, mobile endpoint devices can exploit browsers that can handle on-line applications regardless of differences in smartphone form factors. This will make it practical to use a single, multimodal mobile device for multiple contexts and application interfaces supported by UC.

Highlights of Forrester End User Survey on Business User Mobility

The Forrester survey covered responses from 2001 information workers who worked in an organization with 100 or more employees.

· 11% of U.S. workers currently use a “smartphone” at work
(14% of iWorkers in the U.S., Canada, and UK)
· 64% would like to use smartphones for work
· 33% of respondents use their own mobile phones for work
For comparison, (33% of U.S. workers have a laptop)
· Teleworkers, on average work two hours more per week than office workers
· 81% of iWorkers use smartphones from home
· 62% while traveling
· 64% at their office desks
· 29% spend more than 3 hours a day on their mobile device

The increasing demand for smartphone usage for both personal consumer usage, as well as business needs, is leading enterprise organizations to move away from “corporate-liable” cost responsibility for all mobile usage to a “shared user-liable” approach to costs which allows individual users to choose their own smartphones and services.

The “Fly in the Smartphone Ointment”

While the practical demand for increased device-independent mobility for business applications is rapidly increasing, there are, unfortunately, still software standardization barriers for smartphones. These will interfere with realizing the objective of “universal” mobile accessibility to both people contacts and mobile business apps through smartphones. These problems are highlighted in an article reporting from the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where new smartphones were one of the big highlights of the show.

With all the new smartphones being announced, the problem for universal interoperability of mobile applications apparently is the fact that they use different mobile operating systems that are incompatible. Even mobile OS software from the same developer comes in a variety of versions. This has caused mobile application developers to create different versions of their applications – a very expensive and restrictive way to productize software.

A potential solution to the problem is expected from a new, hardware-independent, software-based platform standard called HTML5, which is expected to start putting in an appearance this year. This is expected to support graphical applications through smartphone Web browsers.

Consumer use of Smartphones will prove a boon to customer interactions with enterprise organizations and services, because they will enable personalized, timely, proactive customer service notifications by automated business process applications (CEBP). This will be particularly useful in health care and financial services, where notification flexibility and timeliness can be critical, along with easy contextual access to live assistance (“click-to-call”) when necessary.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Are Enterprise Users Waiting For The CIO To Lead Them To UC?

2009-12-01T00:51:00.004-05:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

November 25, 2009

How Can The CIO Help Enterprise Users Migrate To UC?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

There has been a lot of talk, but still relatively little action, on the enterprise UC migration front. There are a number of practical reasons why this has been so, including:

· Confusion about what “UC” really is all about as a concept vs. specific technology requirements.
· Migrating to UC is an ongoing transition from proprietary, hardware-based communication applications to a “virtual” framework of interoperable, integrated, IP-based, software application servers and endpoint clients.
· Legacy communications still work and those investments are being maximized, particularly expensive telephone systems.
· UC-enabled telephony (“UC Telephony”) goes beyond IP Telephony because it integrates with all other UC communication applications and business process applications. It will require a simple, flexible, and inexpensive integration framework to support interoperability between existing and new forms of communication, e.g., social networking applications, at the user interface level with to be successful.
· Lack of demand from enterprise end users for new UC functionality is complicated by the fact that individual end users will all have different, personalized needs, including their choice of mobile communication devices and services.
· Individual UC application technologies are still evolving, along with appropriate new standards, e.g., SIP.
· Confusion about who in the enterprise organization should be involved and when for UC implementation planning.
· Since all forms of communication with people are considered elements of UC, they are all being labeled by the technology providers as “UC”, even if they are not properly integrated.
· The recessionary economic climate has slowed down all enterprise technology investments.

The “Who” of Enterprise UC Migration

UC application implementations in enterprise organizations will be influenced by different groups within the organization because such groups have different perspectives of need and value for using UC-integrated versions of traditional communication applications.

There are three main constituencies in an enterprise organization that should be directly involved in the planning for UC implementations:
· Business management – Primarily interested in improving business processes and operational performance through more efficient and effective means of people contact and information access through UC technologies.
· IT management - Primarily concerned with costs to implement and maintain enterprise technologies, as well as the ability to integrate them with existing and future applications and services.
· Individual end users - Focused on communication flexibility, ease of use, device independence, personalization, and saving time in doing their jobs whenever and wherever they happen to be.

The big question is, who should be driving the demand for UC solution implementations within an enterprise organization?

One would normally expect that the real users of the technology, those who benefit most directly, might be clamoring for the benefits of UC; e.g., business management, who could realize faster operational benefits from the elimination of “human contact latency” in business process performance (“UC-B”). Individual internal users might want the personal productivity benefits of UC, particularly when mobile, in order to do their jobs more easily and flexibly, regardless of their location (“UC-U”).

External end users, such as consumers/customers or business partners, will also want the UC benefits of faster and more flexible contacts, particularly when mobility is involved. However, because such users are outside of the organization, they will be dependent on how enterprise communication technologies will interoperate with public network services that outsiders will typically be using.

UC Demand and Justifications

IT management will traditionally support implementation of new technologies if there is, first, justifiable demand from the other two constituencies, including budgetary support. IT management will also be even more interested if the new technology can also significantly reduce current technology support costs that are IT’s responsibility.

However, because of the confusion surrounding what UC actually does and who will benefit most directly, there has been little serious demand (yet) from those first two constituencies. As a result, UC-oriented technology providers have been trying to sell IT management primarily on cost-saving benefits like Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which is usually of little interest to individual end users or even to revenue-sensitive Line of Business management. In the meantime, UC migration planning has not yet involved LOB management or individual end users very much, even though their different needs must help define UC requirements first!

The CIO As Enterprise UC Migration Leader

For several years the question has been raised as to who should be in charge of driving enterprise UC migration planning and how. The answers have ranged from the CEO down to Telecom management, the latter mainly because legacy telephony systems are being affected the most by new forms of IP communication and their integration under UC. However, now that IP Telephony (IP-PBXs and IP phones) are replacing TDM phone systems in both end-of-life and “greenfield” situations, those implementations should really be part of a broader “UC migration” plan for both business processes and individual end user communication needs.

Although Line of Business management and individual end users must help to identify their specific UC application requirements and their implementation priorities, it will still be up to IT to plan and manage the various steps required for migrating to UC in an evolutionary manner. For this reason, it will be in the best interests for enterprise IT management to start the UC migration ball rolling with two initial steps:

1. Establish a convenient, cost-efficient integration approach to UC migration to be prepared for any initial pilot UC applications and integrations required.

2. Promote awareness and understanding of what UC really means for those other constituencies and coordinate their UC requirements and priorities for initial application implementation planning.

Once migration to UC has successfully started, it will then become an ongoing, learning process for both users and IT support that will be a never-ending step 3.

Step 1. Establish An Integration Framework For UC Migration

Although UC encompasses all forms of communication interoperability, voice telephony usage will be the most impacted because the traditional telephony endpoint devices and network infrastructures are changing so dramatically. However, legacy telephone systems cannot be simply replaced throughout an enterprise organization, especially in multiple locations with different phone systems because of both cost and complexity of traditional telephony system implementations.
This is where a UC migration framework should be selected that will:

1. Support a technology approach for integrating and simplifying future migrations from existing siloed communication systems to a centralized UC environment that is flexible, cost-efficient, and “future-proof.”

2. Provide a UC migration platform that will cost-efficiently and selectively support evolutionary integrations of key UC applications including:
a. Device-independent “UC Telephony” for desktops and mobile usage
b. IP-based voice and video conferencing
c. Interoperability with unified messaging servers and public social networking services
d. Federated presence management integrations for enterprise IM, telephony, public social networking services, and business process applications
e. Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) integrations with enterprise business applications
f. Integration of all forms of customer contacts with an enterprise organization that are inbound or outbound, device-independent, and will include inbound/outbound self-service applications. This will exploit UC capabilities for those enterprise communication applications that I have labeled as “Customer UC”.
g. Providing consolidated UC activity data collection and reporting tools to cover all forms of communication activity with people, as either initiators or as recipients, both inside and outside of the organization. This will enable critical metrics to be developed to manage the ongoing effectiveness of UC solutions in business process performance.

There can be a number of choices for how UC migration platforms can be deployed, including premise-based, managed, hosted, or a hybrid approach. Whichever approach is selected, the availability of such a flexible “UC migration platform” will facilitate the next two UC implementation steps, including educating end user constituencies and identifying their UC requirements, to be carried out more effectively.

UC migration platforms that satisfy the need for both maximum, standards-based flexibility and low investment costs are relatively new technology offerings that simplify integrations of old and new enterprise communications technologies under a common UC framework. In particular, they can facilitate the creation of “UC Telephony” capabilities within any existing enterprise telephony environment, selectively and cost effectively. For an excellent presentation and discussion of this evolutionary UC migration strategy with a leading provider of this technology, view the UCStrategies.com webinar on Aastra’s “overlay” approach that exploits its “Clearspan” UC platform for flexible and low-cost migrations to UC.

According to Aastra’s cost analysis of migrating to UC by replacing an old PBX with a new IP-PBX, compared to simply adding an “overlay UC platform” that can control all necessary integrations with existing telephony infrastructures and other UC applications, the cost per user for “UC Telephony” is estimated to be one-third that of an IP-PBX replacement. That doesn’t include the savings and disruption avoidance gained by keeping existing infrastructure equipment (PBXs, desktop phones). This approach also facilitates selective, customized, and priority-based UC migrations based upon the real needs of the user constituencies as they evolve.

Step 2. Who Needs What? When? – Evolving User UC Requirements

Obviously, a critical step for moving an organization slowly, but surely, towards an operational UC environment is to fully understand the existing communication problems of high-value business processes, the communication requirements of different user groups, and even individual end user needs for “role-based” communication applications. Personalization and “role-based” application needs will be key to determining selective individual end user UC requirements.

As the high-value operational business communication problems (or “Hot Spots” as my UniComm colleagues call them) are identified, IT management can proceed to do its job of planning the implementation for specific UC applications/solutions. These can then be prioritized and associated with existing and new communication products and services that require UC integrations. (Filling in the UC “holes!") This will also enable IT management to evaluate various available vendor offerings from a broad UC perspective, rather than just on an individual application basis, for interoperability, functionality, usability, supportability, and costs.

This user-based information will then lead to identifying UC’s impact on IT’s infrastructure and integration responsibilities for wired and wireless networking requirements, integration with business application servers, user endpoint software client needs, mobile device independence, traffic and usage management, access security, etc.

Step 2 for a CIO or IT management is therefore NOT to simply select technology replacements for legacy telephony systems or other communication applications such as IM or CEBP applications, nor even to start worrying about the implementation or support costs involved in UC applications. Rather, that step must be to help the “user” constituencies in the organization understand the different user perspectives of UC and participate in identifying, justifying, and prioritizing specific UC solution implementations. While reducing costs is always a valid UC planning objective, that alone will not justify the kind of disruptive change that UC is bringing to both technology management, business operations, and end user communication procedures.

Step 3. UC Migration Learning
With a UC migration platform in place and user requirements being identified, a flexible, selective, and self-paced learning phase (pilots, trials) can begin for an organization to quickly realize important performance benefits for high-value business processes (UC-B). In addition, individual end user productivity benefits in doing their different jobs (UC-U) will also be gained.

In the latter case, there will also be an opportunity to identify specific end user “role” needs and usability requirements for different endpoint devices. Finally, it will also be a learning phase for IT to gain experience in supporting the various old and new communication applications of a UC environment. This is a critical point where IT management has to both learn its new responsibilities and help guide operational changes being introduced by UC solutions and mobility changes.

Based on the results of Step 2, migration planning for UC can be finalized for the business processes trialed, and extended to larger groups of users. While it is always nice to have individual end users create demand because of the viral nature of individual user benefits of UC, (UC-U), the CIO must take into consideration the business process performance benefits (UC-B), as well as costs (TCO), for supporting UC migrations cost effectively. IT management must insure that their UC platform can collect activity data across all forms of UC communications, as well as reporting tools to provide the metrics for evaluating and managing both UC-U as well as UC-B benefits.

Perhaps most importantly for enterprise IT organizations, internal IT resources must be evaluated in order to decide to what extent UC solutions can be managed and supported internally vs. using third-party services.

Summary

Enterprise IT will have its work cut out for it in terms of starting to migrate to a UC-based environment. The justification and priorities for making the moves must, however, come from the other enterprise constituencies. This is where the CIO can play a leading role in organizing and managing the migration planning activity, including being prepared to quickly respond to important user needs for UC solutions. Because there will be little internal prior experience with UC implementations, this may require the services of outside consultants to identify and quantify UC solution needs and their potential value both to the enterprise and to specific end users.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Converging Real-time Communication and Publication

2009-12-01T00:41:00.000-05:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

November 28, 2009

UC Strategies Uses Sonexis For Converging UC Conferencing and Publication

By Art Rosenberg

One of the big UC applications that both reduces business costs and speeds up collaborative work is real-time conferencing. The latter benefit is particularly useful when independent experts in different locations outside of an organization have to discuss issues in a timely manner. With the way UC Strategies.com is organized, not only does simplified voice conferencing facilitate coordination of creative thinking between the independent UC experts, but it also closes the loop between internal discussions and the selective publication of such thinking in the form of immediate podcasts.

The challenge that UC Strategies experts face is not uncommon in most businesses today. Not everyone who needs to be involved in discussing issues or sharing information is necessarily in the same physical location at the same time any more. What makes the challenge for UC Strategies as an objective industry thought-leader even more interesting is that the topics discussed are very dynamic and debatable and are very interesting to its audience.

Accordingly, what UC Strategies does with voice/web conferencing, is to practice what it preaches by starting a conferencing connection between its distributed team. In many cases, the participants are talking from mobile phones. The conference call then is then wrapped up by recording a final summary of individual comments by the participants for publication as a podcast on the UC Strategies web site.
So, not only do the independent UC Strategies experts meet regularly as a team, they can also quickly publish their output as perspectives on the latest developments in the evolving UC technologies industry.

Using Sonexis Conference Manager

As a frequent user of conferencing, UC Strategies has exploited the technology offering of Sonexis, a long-time leading provider of in-house and managed audio and optional web conferencing. Their Conference Manager is a flexible, simple to install and use system that reduces the high costs of an external service or purchasing high-end equipment. As a key UC application that can reduce travel costs as well as speed up collaborative interactions, “instant” conferencing activity has increased its operational role in business communications. This is particularly important as business users, both inside and outside of an organization become more accessible through mobile devices.

Sonexis Conference Manager is “investment protected” because they integrate with any and all communication vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Microsoft, IBM, NEC, Aastra, ShoreTel, 3Com, etc…), scales to 400 Web seats and audio ports, and can connect to any environment (PSTN or VOIP). They also have a built-in “insurance policy” that provides free access to a hosted system if needed in the event of downtime or for disaster recovery.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Avaya's Aura Exploits CEBP For Notification Solutions

2009-11-03T21:11:00.002-05:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

November 3, 2009

Avaya Runs With CEBP For Aura “UC Telephony” Solutions

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

“Collaboration” means working together, exchanging information, and communicating in a timely manner with people and processes in various ways. It usually is a term that applies to people involved in a common task or problem and often need to discuss important issues in real time.

However, "customers" were rarely treated the same as enterprise personnel in the collaborative space because they are independent of the enterprise communications and information infrastructure and can’t be easily contacted for timely collaborative interactions .

With the interoperability of the Internet, personalized multi-modal endpoint devices, business communication applications, business process applications, presence information, and mobile accessibility, "Customer UC" flexibility is enabling business contacts with customers to be treated in a more "collaborative" way. What “UC” as a concept does is to make the choice of interaction more flexible for all the people directly involved with a business process.

Process-to-Person Contacts For Work Flow Inside And Outside The Organization

UC is not just about person-to-person contacts, but also about pro-active process-to-person "notifications" that enable the recipient to dynamically use any mode of notification receipt (text, speech), as well as choose the modality of response. The latter can include interactions with automated self-service business process applications (on-line, IVR) and any mode of communication access to live assistance when necessary.

Outbound contacts with customers by automated business process applications is coming to life under the label of "Communications Enabled Business Processes" or CEBP, and will be particularly effective with the growing population of mobile users that carry "smart-phones" for flexible accessibility and increased availability and responsiveness.

CEBP, coupled with UC, is thus enabling customers to become part of the "collaborative" business landscape by providing a cost-effective means for a business process application to contact a customer whenever and wherever they may be through UC "notification and response" services. Notification alone is not enough to close the communication loop in a timely and efficient manner. Remember the pager?

Avaya Puts Aura To Work To Support Timely Business Process Flow

Avaya has just announced its first customizable automated outbound solutions for its Aura enterprise communications system that provides what I call "UC Telephony" (IP Telephony) integrations across multi-vendor, multi-location, and multi-modal business processes. One solution is called Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) designed to orchestrate and streamline the voice contacts between people involved in coordinating any real-time business process activity, but especially in responding to urgent or emergency situations.

The second solution is called Avaya Proactive Outreach for Financial Services for the mortgage market, which automatically contacts customers by phone to determine eligibility. This is an example of a proactive outbound IVR application that can also trigger delivery of text messages that contain a URL link for further self-service actions. In addition, the Outreach solution provides timely messaging notifications of ongoing mortgage processing status, as well as any need for real-time interactions, if required.

Such CEBP-based business process solutions are unlimited and, like smart-phone " apps," will proliferate swiftly with Aura system customers. Clearly, multimodal, mobile accessibility will be key to the effectiveness of many of these solutions, so we should see more mention of the role of Mobile UC in the future.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

2009-10-23T20:59:00.002-04:00

Copyright © 2009 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
October 23, 2009

“Customer UC” For Improving Collections ROI

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As knowledgeable technology experts now agree, unified communications (UC) is a concept for integrating the use of various forms of communication technologies to make more flexible and efficient contact with people; such contacts can be initiated either by other people, or, even more importantly for business processes, by automating process workflows.

The “ROI” of UC technologies is expected to come from both reduced costs and more efficient and productive business processes that involve timely contact with people. The latter objective will also include reducing labor costs by exploiting automated notifications and self-service applications. More importantly, any customer-facing business process activity that can impact revenue generation will be of particular interest to business management, making contact center applications high-priority targets for UC implementation planning.

We are starting to see some contact center applications being integrated with UC capabilities to help provide the ROI that enterprises require. For example, Aspect, which has its roots in the contact center market, announced its unified communications solution, “Streamlined Collections.” By applying its long experience with traditional, telephony-based outbound customer contact and self-service applications to the increased need to make debt collection both more productive and cost efficient, Aspect is targeting a common high-value business process that suffers from the limitations of traditional, person-to-person telephone contacts.

The nature of outbound contacts for debt collection lends itself ideally to the flexible capabilities of UC, as well as the opportunity to exploit automated self-services applications, efficiently coupled with selective, on-demand live assistance when needed. This customer-facing outbound UC application fits in very well with other “Customer UC” applications, which I define as all forms of business communication services that directly involve interactions with “customers,” whether as contact initiators or recipients/respondents.

Moving Debt Collection From The Past To The Future

Debt collection letters have always been slow, with no guarantee of delivery or a convenient means of quick response. Collection phone call attempts are even more expensive, especially if you don’t know when and where to make direct contact with a particular person, and/ or debtors are avoiding such contact. The limitation of a traditional phone call to handle a data exchange has also been a major shortcoming for efficiently negotiating a collections interaction with a customer.

However, the consumer communications world has been dramatically changing in terms of personalized communications through individual email mailboxes, personalized mobile “smart-phones,” instant messaging (IM) contacts, Short Message Services (SMS) for mobile devices, social networking contacts, etc. It is really time to exploit the new web-based contact environment, not just the old telephone network, since the limitations of the Telephone User Interface (TUI) also restrict the flexibility of automated self-service applications, requiring greater use of live assistance than online Web applications. So, UC, coupled with mobile, multi-modal “smart-phones,” can expand the benefits of outbound self-service applications and reduce the need for live assistance to provide additional information.

A typical collections scenario would involve a customer contacting a customer service department for an unrelated reason and a business process application detecting the fact that a payment is overdue and automatically generate a personalized (text) “notification” message to the debtor (via email, SMS). A mobile recipient with UC capabilities will have the option to hear the message as well read it. Then, depending on the recipient’s particular situation, various response options can be offered, ranging from simple confirmation of receipt to a choice of payment methods. If there are questions or problems that require additional assistance, the response can escalate to an exchange of emails, a real-time “chat,” or a live call connection to an available and qualified collections agent.

Aspect’s Streamlined Collections integration with UC capabilities exploits “Communications Enabled Business Processes" or “CEBP”, where an automated business process can initiate an outbound communication contact to an individual person, based on personalized criteria. Customer debt collection is an ideal application for CEBP, enabling the choice of outbound contact, self-service application, and access to live assistance to be automatically optimized selectively on an individual customer basis.

“First Contact Resolution” Metrics For Outbound Customer Contact
Personalization of outbound contacts for customer collections will be very critical, because it will require differentiating the modality requirements of contact – proactive notifications coupled with self-service or live assistance options, as well as privacy concerns for the individual customer. Aspect has categorized its collection activities across different “phases” of the process, i.e.:

· “Early stage” 30- day
· “Mid-stage” 60-90-day
· “Late stage 90-day +

Each phase can have its own “message” to deliver, along with different choices for delivery and distinct self-service application options and live assistance requirements. Leveraging consumer’s increased use of ‘smart-phones” will enable faster contact accessibility, as well as customer response flexibility for both online or voice response self-service options. This will also minimize the need for live agent involvement unless requested by the customer. The self-service approach also facilitates identifying the level of live assistance required, which may or may not be immediately available and can be deferred.

Just as IVR applications have traditionally been used to screen incoming calls and determine intelligent routing to qualified call center agents, outbound contacts that connect recipients to either an online or an IVR self-service application can perform the same role for customer access to live assistance via a presence-based call connection or chat session.

Benefits for Everyone

Although important, it is simply not enough to claim that UC technologies will reduce enterprise operational costs in various ways. Unless it pays off in making a specific business process more efficient and productive for all users involved, the overall business process results will not be optimized. In the case of the Aspect Streamlined Collections contact center application. UC-based technologies exploit mobile consumer communications, email, and self-service technologies to maximize the following benefits:

For the enterprise:
· Efficient customization of interactions for different customer circumstances
· Faster revenue generation
· Minimized operational costs, especially need for staffing support
· Lower infrastructure technology costs
· Maximizing customer retention, customer experience satisfaction

For the customer:
· Greater contextual personalization of collection contacts
· Maintaining customer privacy for such interactions
· Opportunity to avoid or minimize financial penalties
· More response flexibility and information access, especially for mobile customers
· Greater flexibility for access to live assistance on demand

UC-based business process applications can be selectively implemented to improve a particular business process that will involve a specific group of end users, both inside and outside of an organization. They can integrate existing communication technologies with new capabilities to produce the benefits of cost savings, but more importantly, business process efficiencies and productivity. Aspect’s Streamlined Collections Solution is a practical example of the benefits of Customer UC in the rapidly changing world of consumer communications.

The consumer transition to universal online Internet access, UC, and multimodal “smartphones” won’t take place overnight, so there will be a requirement for enterprise organizations to continue to support traditional customer telephone contacts in addition to new UC contacts, with live assistance. For this reason, the Streamlined Collections unified communication applications for the contact center from Aspect integrates its outbound contact planning and workforce management functions to optimize “agent” and “expert” resources across all forms of customer interactions.

In addition, Aspect has its collections business process optimization solution packaged as “Optimized Collections,” which focuses on enhancing calling strategies and helps apply the right resources at the right times to improve collector productivity.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Getting Enterprise Telephony Ready For UC

2009-10-21T11:29:00.001-04:00

Copyright © 2009 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

October 19, 2009

New, Combined Gateway Simplifies Migration of Enterprise Telephony To OCS UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

While business managers in enterprise organizations may just be starting to research their operational business needs to identify and prioritize their UC requirements to improve business processes, IT management must prepare to migrate existing enterprise telephone systems into the coming UC infrastructure environment.

For the many organizations that are deploying the latest version of Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS 2007 R2) for their UC infrastructure, NET’s newest VX series gateway with Enhanced UC Features, will provide a very practical, cost-savings approach to integrating enterprise telephony with the PSTN, SIP trunking, different PBX systems, and various UC applications provided through OCS. This migration can be done selectively to support specific individual end users (e.g., mobile users) or for selected business groups as needed, rather than on an across the boards basis.

As has been stressed many times, UC is not a single communication system, but a concept of open, communication applications that are interoperable across different user interfaces. UC communication applications must also be able to integrate with a variety of enterprise business process applications to enable them to initiate contacts and to interact with people both inside (internal staff) and outside (business partners, customers) of an enterprise organization. This also means that communication access for UC applications must support network and device independence, if necessary through gateways, in order to allow for all forms of contact between people and any business process applications they interact with.

The flexibility for Microsoft’s OCS to support a variety of SIP service providers or ITSP’s is also expanded by NET’s demarcation gateway approach. As a certified Microsoft partner for OCS gateway, NET gateways increase the number of supported, approved SIP carriers from three to eleven, and also directly support a wide list of WAN interfaces.

While it will take time to plan and implement all the business process applications that can be communications enabled (CEBP), IT management doesn’t have to wait, but can safely get a head start by moving forward with integrating existing telephony capabilities with Microsoft’s OCS server and UC applications.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Customer UC Issue #5 - Implementing Customer UC Applications

2009-10-03T21:18:00.003-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

October 3, 2009

“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss Issue #5 – Trialing and Implementing New UC Applications

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

More Panelist Comments on “Customer UC” Issues

I put all business communication contacts that directly involve customer facing activities into “Customer UC,” because they must ultimately all be accounted for in managing customer relationships. This topic was discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers at a kickoff session, ”UC and the Contact Center,” at TMC’s last Internet Telephony conference in L.A. (9/1-3). My panelists were representatives from Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality.

In previous posts on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space, I summarized comments by the panelists on the first four issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit the benefits of UC for customer contact activities.

Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:

Issue #5. How should an organization implement new “Customer UC” applications for their customers?

As business information becomes increasingly accessible online over the public Internet, the need for an organization to provide personnel for such access is greatly reduced. Not only does this capability for direct customer online access to information reduce operational labor costs, but it expands customer service levels to 24x7 self-services and opens the door to other kinds of transactional services that would traditionally be limited to “office hours” and premise-based access. Clearly, cost-effective expanded customer service capabilities can accelerate revenue growth and profitability.

Voice-based self-service (IVR) applications, while productive, have always been limited to simple applications because anything complex would quickly require live assistance. On-line web-based applications have been better because visual screen interfaces are much more practical for information output, long menus, graphic output, links to web sites, etc., but once live assistance is required, it becomes limited to Instant Messaging facilities or email, with no simple way to switch to a real-time voice connection. However, with the rapid consumer adoption of personalized, multi-modal, mobile devices (“smart-phones”), UC can now help bridge the gap between customers, online or voice self-service applications, and various sources of live assistance. Going a step further, business process applications can now also become more pro-active in contacting customers to flexibly deliver information and services on a customized, individual end-user basis.

The challenge for implementing any new contact center communication applications will be a learning process to design and test the new user interfaces and integrations with real customers and contact center staff, before finalizing such offerings. Given the fact that UC is still evolving as a set of old and new communication applications that need to integrate and interact with each other and with business process applications, most business organizations don’t have all the technologies nor the expertise in place to develop and test the effectiveness of a UC solution to a business process problem. We have a “chicken and egg” situation - we don’t want invest too heavily in new technologies until we can demonstrate that it will work with customers and will produce the benefits for expected.

Most consultants and industry pundits therefore push the practical idea of “pilots” and “trials,” but that only raises the questions of “how?”

Panelist Comments

· Every organization will have its own business process application candidates for UC trialing. Based upon type of business, customer base and geographical locations, current use of self-service applications, and strategic operational problems that need to be addressed

· The business process application that is of high priority because of time-criticality and impact on revenues, but with relative ease of testing implementation, should be selected for trialing first

· The key operational problems associated with that application must be identified first

· The UC feature set required for that application solution and it’s operational problems must be determined

· The users involved, including, “agents,” “experts” and types of customers, must all be identified for trialing purposes

· Any existing online or IVR self-service applications must be evaluated for changes that must be made for new options for customers and impact on customer-facing staff (“agents,” “experts,” business partners)

· Performance metrics, for evaluating the pilot, need to be established, including metrics not previously used for traditional call center operations

· “Try before buy!” – Before investing in the purchase of new technologies, it would be advantageous to utilize hosted services to test the tools for designing, developing and managing the UC communication applications and for integrating them with existing process business applications

· A “phased” approach may be used for a given business process application, where not all the desired UC applications are implemented or integrated at once. For example, the first target might be online customers and a specific set of business process applications that can maximize the benefits of UC flexibility at the desktop. Alternatively, mobile customers might be the first targets because of their increased accessibility and need for both timely delivery with multi-modal flexibility

· After trialing the application solution for its effectiveness with the users involved, a next step will be to test the approach for scalability with increased volumes.

· Prepare both your “pilot” customers and “agents” for the expected changes they will experience from legacy technologies in both self-service options and in accessing live assistance. Based on the actual user results, the user preparation for the full rollout can be finalized.

Bottom line, every organization should be prepared to learn how to benefit from UC in the contact center environment, even though the technology is still evolving and experience is lacking. Trialing and piloting self-service applications with hosted and “cloud”-based software services are rapidly becoming a cost-effective, practical alternative to quickly finding out what you don’t yet really know about your customized, UC-based, self-service application needs.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC and Contact Center Panel Issue #4 - Where Does CEBP Fit In?

2009-09-27T15:06:00.000-04:00

Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

September 26, 2009

“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss Impact of CEBP on Business Applications

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

More Panelist Comments on “Customer UC”

In previous posts on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A., I summarized comments by my panelists on the first three issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit UC for customer contact activities.

I have labeled all customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC,” which was then discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers at a kickoff session, ”UC and the Contact Center,” at TMC’s last Internet Telephony conference in L.A. (9/1-3). My panelists were representatives from leading innovative contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality, Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:

Issue #4. How will business process applications be affected by “CEBP” in a Customer UC environment?

With UC, different forms of business communication contact may be activated, depending upon who (or what) is initiating the contact with a person, which may be person-to-person or process-to-person. The type of contact will also depend upon the current real-time accessibility and availability of the contact recipient. As more elements of a business process become automated, e.g., monitoring sensitive status conditions, the role of real-time process-to-person “notifications” will increase, including what is commonly referred to as “Communications Enabled Business Communications” (CEBP).

CEBP commonly stands for “Communications Enabled Business Process,” which means that an automated) business process application can initiate a communications contact to a specific person, instead of it being done manually by another person. Needless to say, this kind of capability is particularly useful for contacting mobile recipients and for what some people call “outbound IVR” to exploit self-service transactions initiated by a business process application. Another term for such a capability is a “Communications enabled application” or CEA, which can apply to non-business applications as well, e.g., entertainment, social contacts, games, etc.

Like everything new that is falling under the umbrella of UC, the definitions for “CEBP” can be confusing. Microsoft’s OCS enables it’s online users to “click-to-call” contextually from information within any online software application. And, of course, there is competition for the term itself from the likes of “all-in-one” enterprise communications provider, Interactive Intelligence, with its communications-based workflow platform it describes as providing “CBPA” (Communications-Based Process Automation). The difference claimed there is that CBPA consolidates work flow activity on a communications-based platform, making contacts with people at any point in the process flow readily accessible, while CEBP doesn’t go beyond enabling individual applications within a work flow process to contact people.

The business application contact target could be any end user, including people within a business organization or external users such as business partners and consumer/customers. The contact initiator can also be any type of end user who may be using a CEBP application, or it could be initiated pro-actively and directly by a CEBP application itself to send personalized information or a notification to a specific person.

Process-to-person forms of contact initiation will require the business application involved to interoperate with various communication applications (telephony, messaging, presence management, routing information, etc.) just as a person would, providing specific contact information (name, “addressing”, etc.). However, an automated application that can make contact with a customer’s phone (mobile or desktop), will obviously not be expected to carry on a voice conversation that people do.

Panelist Comments

· The technology for enabling business process applications to exploit UC capabilities at the recipient end, particularly customers using mobile “smart-phones, is complex and still evolving.

· Today, CEBP is still very much the exception and not the rule, when you consider the fact that 75% of businesses in the US are under 20 employees.

· CEBP needs to complement existing business process applications enabling different forms of contact and interaction between the contact initiator (application process, person) and the recipient (person).

· In a contact center environment, CEBP must support the basic objectives to align a customer need with available types of company support resources -i.e., self-service, live assistance or a combination of both. This can be done on the traditional contact center “on-demand” response basis, or pro-actively by automated business process applications that monitor and respond to dynamic status information.

· UC flexibility improves contact accessibility and thus flexibility when person-to-person contacts are required. Increased accessibility through both mobility and UC flexibility will make CEBP applications more useful and productive.

· Unified Messaging will be a key UC application that enables a business process application to efficiently deliver a time-sensitive notification to an accessible (mobile) customer for information delivery. Coupled with “click-to-interact” with an online or IVR self-service application, or “click-to-talk/chat” for live assistance, the customer can immediately execute time-sensitive transactions that require attention.

· If CEBP is deployed correctly, it will be perceived positively by customers and will also reduce traditional on-demand contact needs.

Example: Proactive flight status notifications that advise a passenger of gate changes and departure time changes can proactively provide timely updates to a mobile customer. Customer will rely on such timely and up-to-date notifications to avoid, minimize and correct their travel problems.

· The impact of such timely access to personalized information will be greater customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduced labor costs for handling unnecessary on-demand contacts.

· CEBP is, by its nature, a highly customized business application development and almost always requires an integration and/or professional services design and development effort. However, off-the-shelf CEBP applications that apply to horizontal industries can be useful in minimizing the costs and effort in developing customized versions.

· The growing adoption of mobile “smart-phones” by consumers and business users will be a major driver for implementing CEBP for both customers and customer-facing staff.

· Such use of mobile devices will also enable CEBP to tie in comfortably with personalized, self-service options on a proactive, rather than just on an “on demand” basis. This will minimize the need for staffing customer assistance and associated costs, in order to maximize customer satisfaction.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC Escalations in Customer Contacts

2009-09-23T12:02:00.003-04:00

Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

September 23, 2009

Drilling Down Into Contact Center “Escalations” With UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

UC is starting to get increasingly focused on customer contacts because that is where both business costs can be reduced and revenues improved. A recent post on the subject at www.UCStrategies.com by Michael Barbagallo drills down into how subject matter experts (SMEs) should be efficiently brought into contact center operations and whether their involvement should be tracked and reported.

Here is my comment to that perspective.

Michael,

I am glad to see you drilling down into call center procedures, as they will apply to customer contact operations and “agent”-“expert” escalations.

While I agree with your views on including "experts" in workflow management reporting for business process performance tracking, we have to include the role of the customer in “escalating to assistance” as well. Accordingly, UC will be disruptive for customers too, since they will be increasingly "escalating" to live assistance from self-service applications (online, IVR), using multi-modal devices (PCs, smartphones). That also means it can be their choice to contextually "click-to-call," "click-to-chat," or, if there is no real rush, "click-to-message" (text, voice) for live assistance from their multi-modal endpoint devices.

Note: “Contextually” means that information about the self-service application they were using will be passed on to the person providing assistance (“screen pop”).

That also means new, UC-based "contact centers" must move away from the metric of just First “Call” Resolution to First “Contact” Resolution and apply it to both "customer" and "agent" escalation procedures. In many cases, the need for assistance and escalation requires further informational research or approval authorization, so there is no point in keeping a caller connected to wait for such resolution. Furthermore, with consumers becoming increasingly accessible and available because of personal Mobile UC, keeping them on a voice connection or transferring them unnecessarily becomes questionable from an “experience” perspective. With mobility and UC, we can always get back to them easily and quickly!

Which brings us to the next point of what I call "Customer UC," pro-active process-to-person contacts using CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes). With UC, we don't need to always have people deliver real-time information to people. Automated business process applications can now do that using Mobile UC tools for media flexibility and faster notification/delivery, coupled with "click-for-assistance" if necessary. That will take labor costs, as well as the "human latency," out of many business processes.

Needless to say, Mobile UC won't happen overnight and won't always be available to all customers, so the old call center "agent”/”expert” game will continue being played but on a “virtual” basis. However, on the enterprise side, “agents” and “experts” will not only NOT be collocated geographically, but will be selected for "escalation" based upon their "availability” and contextual qualifications, not by "agent" choice. This will apply to all involved customer-facing staff, who may belong to different business organizations.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Issue #3 UC and Contact Centers

2009-09-18T16:35:00.002-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

September 18, 2009

“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss UC and the Contact Center - Issue # 3

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

More Panelist Comments on Implementing “Customer UC”

In my previous post on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A., I summarized comments by my panelists on the first two issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit UC for customer contact activities.

From a business results perspective, UC ROI performance must include metrics like customer satisfaction (soft) and revenue generation (hard), not just cost savings and Total Cost of Ownership (hard). Customer contact activities are therefore increasingly being evaluated as high-value applications for overall UC implementation planning.

I have labeled all customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC.” These kinds of challenges were discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers on the subject of ”UC and the Contact Center” at TMC’s Internet Telephony conference in L.A. at the beginning of this month (9/1-3).
My panelists were representatives from leading innovative contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality, Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:

Issue #3. What are the key considerations for presence in a Customer UC environment?

· “Agent” availability, once they have been logged on to their desktops and set their status to being ready to take a call assignment (inbound or outbound), has always been a part of ACD technologies in traditional telephone call centers. Being “available” for a phone call means that they are not on another phone call, but can be doing other tasks that are interruptible or can be multi-tasked.

· Agent assignment to non-voice tasks can be made to a “busy” agent, especially, when such tasks are not “real-time” and can be done “as soon as possible,” e.g., outbound calls (“call blending”), messaging responses, etc. Even several customer real-time IM assignments can be multi-tasked by a single agent.

· Real-time access to non-“agents,” i.e., (”Subject Matter Experts” or SMEs) is becoming a key concern for customer contact operations and is dependent on (1) their accessibility and (2) their availability. For the most part, SMEs are not directly accessible to customer callers, but could be assigned to handle appropriate customer messages. However, “first line agents” who need assistance from an SME, must themselves be guided by presence and availability to whichever live assistance resource is available at the moment, like an “ACD for SMEs.”

· Wireless mobility and the use of multi-modal endpoint devices (notebooks, “smart-phones”), will increase accessibility to SMEs, and thus SME availability.

· However, SMEs are very dynamically “available” and “accessible,” and only they know whether they can provide real-time assistance to an “agent,” based on the SME’s current situation and other task priorities. A panel recommendation was NOT to make specific “agent” assignments to SMEs or to let an “agent” select the SME of their choice, but to broadcast a “priority alert” message (Dispatch) to all qualified and accessible SMEs and let the “first responder” SME be connected by IM with the requesting “agent” in queue.

· SMEs can also respond to tasks that are not real-time, e.g., responding to an email or SMS message request sent in directly by a customer, field sales/support personnel, or as a result of an automated business process application that is monitoring a customer-related situation (CEBP). Again, making automatic assignments to individual SMEs may not work as well as broadcasting the request to qualified and available “first responders.”

· In real world worst-case situations, where no real-time live assistance is available to resolve a customer problem, customers need to be able to leave information about their needs (trouble tickets, messaging, online or IVR application input, etc.) and given written (text) confirmation of the request, with a time projection for follow up. In many cases, there is no possibility or even need for an immediate fix of a problem; it’s just the customer reporting and acknowledgment that is “real-time.”

· Performance management issues still remain for tracking “agent” vs. “SME” availability. While “agents” have to “punch in” for call handling accountability for their time on the job, SMEs don’t have the same requirements. On the other hand, from a customer perspective, all contact activities involved with a given customer should be tracked, regardless of format and source.

· “Customer presence” is another facet for the contact center in terms of outbound contacts. This is becoming particularly important as consumers become more accessible and therefore more “available” for real-time notifications and connections with mobile smart-phones. This will make “First Call Resolution” and voice conversations less critical than “First Contact Resolution” and message notification and delivery, coupled with “click-to-call” capabilities.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC and Customer Contacts

2009-09-15T15:40:00.003-04:00

Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
September 14, 2009

“Customer UC” –
Voice Assistance Is Only A Part of The “Contextual Contact Center”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As I mentioned in my last article, new unified communications technologies (UC) have started to impact customer contact operations to the point that the traditional “call center” now has to be called a customer “contact “center. In addition, the holy grail of call center performance efficiency, “First Call Resolution” (FCR), must now be called “First Contact Resolution.”

From a business results perspective, UC ROI performance must include metrics like customer satisfaction (soft) and revenue generation (hard), not just cost savings and Total Cost of Ownership (hard). Customer contact activities are therefore increasingly being evaluated as key to overall UC implementation planning.

I have labeled such customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC.” This is where the flexibility of UC technologies are applied to traditional customer contacts (inbound and outbound), “Customer UC” must support users both inside and outside of the organization who are not necessarily at a desktop, on premise, or using the same communication technologies, but are involved directly or indirectly with “customers.” These kinds of challenges were discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers on the subject of ”UC and the Contact Center” at TMC’s Internet Telephony conference in L.A. at the beginning of this month (9/1-3).

The Disruptive Impact of UC and Mobility On Traditional Telephone Call Centers

The traditional call center is no longer really a physically located “center,” but has to be “virtual” in terms of where the technology is located and where the “agents” and “experts” are located. (Call center “customers” have always been “virtual!”) Nor is the next generation “contextual contact center” dedicated to handling just conversational voice calls or automated, self-service applications, based on legacy telephones and Interactive Voice Response technologies.

Because of the exploding consumer shift to personalized, multi-modal, mobile “smart-phones,” coupled with evolving SIP networking infrastructure that can support all forms of person-to-person, person-to-process, and process-to-person interactions, organizations of all sizes will need the power of UC to support the dynamic demands of their users and customers. “Customer UC” must be endpoint device and location independent to provide faster, more efficient access to both information and people to end users involved in their business activities, whether they are internal staff “agents,” and “experts” or external customers and business partners.

What’s Happening With “Customer UC” Today?

Feedback from the contact center market today confirms some of the points made above. In various panel discussions at the IT Expo show, the following interesting observations were noted:

- Business organizations are buying more “UC technology” for contact center applications, although not actually using the technology yet. Desktop video (for conferencing) is in second place as a UC application purchases. This indicates the direction and priorities that UC implementation planning is taking.

- Biggest UC implementation mistakes that enterprise IT staffs seem to be making are:
Making a vendor selection first
No preparations, doing requirements “homework”
Trying to implement UC like existing communications (e.g., treating Microsoft OCS like Exchange)

- The cost of planning for UC is about the same for a large and a smaller business organization, while the cost of implementation will obviously be higher for the larger group. Any size organization will have the similar customer care problems and therefore “Customer UC” will pay off for them all.

- “Hosted” and “cloud computing” solutions are increasingly attractive to any size organization, as IP telephony and wireless mobility become software rather than hardware based.

- UC operational needs are based on individual job responsibilities (“roles”). For the SMB organization, the needs analysis and requirements effort can typically be 50% of the total UC implementation cost. For the large organization, UC implementation can be phased in by individual groups, application by application.
However, the SMB market doesn’t have big legacy technology investments to protect nor IT staffs to train and manage, will “low-hanging fruit” for service providers.

- “Communication Enabled Business Processing” (CEBP) is a big target for UC integration with business applications and mobile customer contact exploitation, but is still evolving. It needs standards for open interoperability to make its role in the “Contextual Contact Center” really take off.

- New IP telephony technology can’t be sold separately without UC integration considerations, making UC marketing a partnering team effort. UC also can’t be sold just on a telephony cost savings basis to IT management alone, thus requiring business management and business process analyses first.

My Panel’s First Two Question

My panelists were representatives from contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality,

1. What Are The Key Drivers For UC In The Contact Center Market?
- Increase flexibility for customer access to mobile and remote personnel who are best qualified and “available” to satisfy specific customer needs
- Increase flexibility of choice for mobile and desktop customers to get information and contextual access to live assistance in real-time (“click-to-call/chat”) or via timely messaging
- Improve operational business process performance by increasing use of self-service applications (online, voice, mobile, proactive services), which minimize both labor needs and human delays.
- Increase customer satisfaction and retention through improved customer experiences, which helps generate revenues and profits. This includes proactive “notifications” to mobile users about time-sensitive, requested information.
- Increase business application flexibility by shifting to communications-enabled software, rather than hardware, that can be customized for any-size business and for individual end users.
- Reduce operational costs and TCO by centralizing and virtualizing operational management and technology support for competitive business operational needs

Note: Although there are UC benefits for everyone involved in customer interactions, there will be different organizational and business priorities for each of the above considerations that must be analyzed and evaluated prior to planning UC implementations.

2.What traditional call center processes will be probably be changed first by UC? Which won’t?

Will:

- Importance of contact handling time vs. effectiveness of modality of contact vs. increasing shift to self-service and pro-active notifications.
- Consolidating “Agent” desktops to facilitate multi-modal customer interactions for various business applications
- Supporting new multi-modal communication needs for remote, online “agents” and “experts”
- Supporting mobile and online multi-modal customers
- Customizing “unified desktops” to make both “agent’ and “expert” interactions more efficient across different business application processes
- Developing new metrics and reports to track all new forms of customer contacts and interactions

Won’t

- Consolidated reporting of all customer interaction metrics from both the customer perspective and live assistance support involved will be evolving after all specific Customer UC capabilities have been successfully tested and implemented
- Automated proactive notifications by business applications will also come later as more customers become mobile and more practical experience is gained with new mobile devices and specific types of applications. At that point, individual applications will have to be integrated to enable “CEBP” functionality and operational management
- Agent empowerment to dynamically switch interaction modalities, e.g., text messaging, voice calls, online collaboration, video conferencing, etc.
- Changing “First Call resolution” to “First Contact Resolution” in terms of responding to a mobile caller by acknowledging the call notification but deferring it in various ways from an immediate real-time voice response
- Won’t change management responsibilities for line of business and customer contact activities.

Comments to other UC-Contact Center issues will be posted later.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Start UC Planning With " Business Performance ROI" (BPR)

2009-08-26T14:05:00.003-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
ãCopyright 2009, The Unified-View – All rights reserved worldwide

August 26, 2009

UC “Performance ROI” – Find The ”Why” and “Who” First!

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

A recent article on NetworkWorld complains that “ROI doesn’t always pan out with unified communications” because it is hard to calculate the cost savings of UC. The article also quotes a Forrester survey of IT managers where about half say they don’t see the business value to deploy UC this year. One IT manager, who actually implemented UC applications in his organization, still complained that it is difficult to quantify the cost-saving value of the “UC stuff.”

Cost Savings – “Is That All There Is?”

In these hectic economic times, the challenge for cost savings has heightened for IT management and CFOs, but there are other business performance objectives as well, i.e., generate revenues faster, minimize losses that can result from missed deadlines or slow responses to emergencies.

A new white paper sponsored by Avaya, a leading provider of traditional telephony technology, reflects an increasing shift of enterprise UC marketing focus from traditional IT management’s concern with infrastructure technology support and cost reductions. The new starting point for UC planning begins with two areas of operational business productivity that IT doesn’t have direct responsibility for:

1. Business process performance and it’s dependencies on flexible contact with people

2. Individual end user task performance and work environment dependencies upon flexible communications accessibility and responsiveness

Both of these UC productivity metrics, labeled by my colleagues at www.UCStrategies.com, as UC-Business Process (UC-B) and UC-User Productivity (UC-U), are key to determining the priorities and choice of UC implementation needs, before IT can jump in with cost saving considerations. To maximize UC-B results, UC-U capabilities must be included.

The inherent variability between different business processes and individual end user job responsibilities means that there can’t be “one UC size fits all.” This variance will especially increase as traditional “person-to-person” voice conversational activities shift from fixed desktops to mobile devices, real-time text messaging, and “process-to-person” notifications and proactive application contacts.

Avaya’s White Paper on The UC “Secret Ingredient”

By contrast to the technology market’s traditional approach to “ROI,” the white paper sponsored by Avaya targets the business management audience, not just IT. Avaya, a dominant telephone system hardware company that has already moved into IP Telephony software, is apparently moving further up the food chain to aggressively compete with third-party consultancies to provide the necessary operational analysis for all elements of UC (not just telephony). This reflects both the complexities of multi-modal UC and implementation alternatives, as well as the current lack of in-house enterprise expertise that is contributing to the delay in enterprise UC adoption described in the Forrester market study.

The “Secret Ingredient” for maximizing UC business value described in the white paper relies on exploiting “professional services” to first determine the value priorities for the “why”” and the “who” of business operational changes that UC applications will enable. Such consulting services are needed to help objectively identify and analyze high-value communication problems or “hot spots” in current business operations that UC solutions can minimize or eliminate.

“Hot Spot” is simply another label for significant “human latency” in a business process caused by communication delays that can impact process performance and results, e.g., missed deadlines, increased overhead, loss of a customer, loss of life, etc. It applies to any important delay or inefficiency that stems from involving communication with people, either as “contact initiators” or as “contact recipients/respondents.” It also means that it includes time-sensitive contacts that are initiated by an automated business process application (“process-to-person” message notifications), not just “person-to-person” contacts.

Most significantly, however, the Avaya white paper acknowledges the increasing importance of all real-time and near-real-time contacts, not just voice conversations, as essential to mobile accessibility and business process performance efficiency and effectiveness.

Nothing Really New!

Of course, Avaya’s new positioning is nothing really new. My colleagues and I at UC Strategies and UniComm Consulting, have long advocated the view that unified communications is not just about moving TDM telephony to IP Telephony and VoIP for cost-savings, nor even to mobile phones for greater voice accessibility. More fundamentally, UC involves the flexible and effective use of all forms of communication with people - anywhere, anyway, any time.

The challenge for bringing UC efficiencies for people into high-value business processes lies in two areas of communication contact:

1. Accessibility

2. Availability

While mobile communications and flexible choice of medium will increase an end user’s ability to initiate a business contact, initiation “accessibility,” it will not necessarily increase a contact recipient’s “availability” or change in business process priorities. For this reason, the traditional telephony notion of immediate, interruptive real-time contacts has to be updated to allow for near-real-time options and more practical “as soon as possible” (ASAP) real-time connections

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Bringing UC To The Contact Center

2009-08-20T10:50:00.003-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

August 18, 2009

Hard Questions For “Customer UC” Panel Discussion

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As UC technology slowly but surely pervades the legacy domains of TDM telephony, the most important targets, from a business operational standpoint, are any enterprise communication contacts that are customer facing. That would include dedicated call center “agents, as well as subject-matter “experts,” decision-makers, and mobile “action-takers (field support).”

(See UC Forum on contact center “Experts”) http://www.ucstrategies.com/forum.aspx?id=4543&g=topics&f=14916

The resulting UC “ROI” is not just from cost-reductions because of more efficient IP infrastructures, or even greater internal staff productivity, but because it can speed up revenue generation or prevent business losses through more responsive and efficient business processes, increase customer satisfaction and retention, and enable better productivity for any end users involved in a business process that requires timely contact with people.

While the role of UC technologies in contact centers is still evolving, it is very obvious that UC flexibility is not going to be restricted to internal enterprise staff, nor just to traditional call center “agents.” Customers and external business partners, along with internal business “experts,” will be affected. Accordingly, there are many kinds of changes that will take place in enterprise communications that will involve UC applications and customer-related activities, which I have labeled as “Customer UC.”

UC Questions For Enterprise Contact Centers

I will be moderating a leadoff panel discussion at the upcoming Internet Telephony Conference in L.A., September 1, 2009, on ”UC and the Contact Center.”

(See Session information at::)
http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/west-2009/attendees/w09-conferences.aspx?t=cc#cc-01

Here are some of the basic “Customer UC” issues that will be addressed:

1. Who should be in charge of Customer UC migration planning? What are the different responsibility roles for IT, Operations, LOB management?

2. What traditional call center processes, including IVR self-service applications, will be changed first by UC? Which won’t?

3. What are key considerations for presence in a Customer UC environment?

4. How will UC benefit contact center “agents” differently than “experts?”

5. How will customer-facing business process applications be affected by UC and “CEBP?”

6. How should new Customer UC capabilities be “trialed” and implemented?

7. What will desktop requirements be for dealing directly with mobile, ”multimodal” customers?

8. What Customer UC features and functions benefits are most important directly to customers? How will they be measured?

Please feel free to send me suggestions for other questions that are bothering you about how UC will change customer interactions within an enterprise. I will be publishing the results of this panel discussion, including audience comments, in a future column.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Panel Discusses The P-PBX in Enterprise UC Implementations

2009-07-29T02:07:00.002-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

Listen to this expert panel that I participated in discuss what is really happening on the enterprise UC implementation front. Points discussed include;

- Implications of Avaya-Nortel acquisition
- Innovative UC communications for business process improvement vs. simple cost reductions
- Role of hosted services vs. premise-based technologies
- Impact of mobile communications on tradtional desktop telephony

Listen now by going to:
http://ucstrategies.com/industry-buzz/uc-experts-disucss-what-is-the-need-for-ip-pbx-in-uc.aspx?gnid=14580

Feel free to comment afterwards on the UC Strategies web site or get back to me at:
artr@ix.netcom.com

Art Rosenberg
The Unified-View

2009-07-22T17:11:00.001-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

July 22, 2009

Smart-phones Have Roadblocks for Mobile UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

A very perceptive article by a Mercury News columnist, Chris O’Brien, puts the spotlight on obstacles to Mobile UC growth that currently exist because of the wireless carrier control over the smart-phone market. Because the flexibility of UC solutions usually provides greater enterprise value for the more dynamic needs of mobile end users than for desktop users, the future growth of UC adoption will be slowed by some of these considerations.

In addition, the many mobile business process applications that can now be exploited through smart-phone (or netbook) “App Store” venues, will be affected by how the carriers will work cooperatively with enterprise-based mobile services for both their business users and consumer customers.

The battle is only beginning but this article cuts to the chase of some of the problems that are in the way of universal adoption of UC. In particular, it raises questions about enterprise support for individual end user UC needs that are discussed in one of the UC Strategies.com forums. (Go to www.ucstrategies.com)

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Where Mobile UC Will Really Pay Off In The Enterprise

2009-06-29T03:35:00.002-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

June 29, 2009

Big Mobile UC Payoffs Coming From Outside The Enterprise

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Anything you read these days about business communications tries to align the technologies within the framework of “unified communications” (UC). What that really means is questionable.

UC is quickly becoming the battleground for all forms of business activities, not only from a technology perspective, but also for the primary constituencies in an enterprise organization. As new UC technologies continue to evolve and converge, legacy communications and new integrations with business process applications are challenging enterprise management to change the way end users do business. This will not only affect people within their own organizations, but key processes that involve their business partners and, most importantly, their customers who generate revenue.

Drilling Down To Enterprise UC Requirements

There are three main constituencies within any enterprise organization that need to significantly benefit from implementing UC technologies and services in order to gain their interest and support: They are:

1. Business and operational management – To generate revenue, minimize risks and losses through strategic and tactical business policies, processes, and procedures

2. Internal end users – To perform their different job responsibilities in business processes easily, efficiently and effectively

3. Technology management – To provide flexible, reliable, and secure business process technology tools, network service infrastructure, and support services to for points 1.and 2. (above) at minimal cost.

All three constituencies will be affected, directly or indirectly, by the migration to mobile, multi-modal UC, especially as it affects communication contacts with different types of people involved in high-value, time-sensitive business processes. These can be characterized as:

· Person-to-person contextual contacts (voice calls, multi-modal messaging)
· Person-to process on-demand access to information, automated transactions, and live assistance
· Process-to-person personalized contacts, especially real-time notifications and interactions
· Increasing personalized contact accessibility for all of the above through mobile devices and services

While Business Management will help identify operational work flow problems, requirements, and priorities for UC needs in enterprise business processes, and IT management will establish UC technology implementation plans, integrations, support, administration management and budgets, the third constituency, the end users, are really the most complex and critical elements to satisfy. Not only do enterprise end users have different job responsibilities and contact relationships, but they also have varying work environment needs for both desktop and mobile business contacts. Finally, what happens with the end users will typically affect the performance of most business processes.

More UC Payoffs – Partners, Customers, Inbound vs. Outbound Mobile Self-services

To complicate matters further, enterprise UC must realistically accommodate efficient business contacts outside of the organization as part of high-value business processes, i.e., business partners and customers. UC facilities must therefore be provided not only to support flexible communication contacts (e.g., federated presence) directly between people wherever they may be located, but also directly between people and automated business process applications, regardless of user endpoint device type and modality of interaction. Only then can business process performance be maximized and “human (contact) latency” be minimized across any group of involved end users.

There has always been a big revenue “pony” under customer contact communications, and traditional call center technology has always taken the lead in supporting both live and automated inbound call-handling activities for customer care applications. However, the real-time demands of voice telephony, coupled with the legacy Telephone User Interface (TUI), left much to be desired in terms of the user experience and efficiency of complex self-service applications.

Although on-line interactive application usage on the Web has now far surpassed traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) self-services, the two are starting to converge both at the PC desktop and with mobile communication devices. The screen interface provides greater flexibility for complex input and output of information, which the limitations of legacy IVR applications could not even begin to deal with and thus always required immediate access to highly trained live assistance.

Automated outbound contact applications were also hampered by the limitations of telephony-based voice contacts in successfully making person-to-person contacts with a particular individual. Now, with the rapid consumer adoption of personalized, mobile, “smart-phones,” all that is changing, for both business and personal service applications. Proactive Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), coupled with flexible mobile contact accessibility, is now positioned to bring the power of a variety of automated application services plus access to live assistance, when necessary, to individual end users, wherever, whenever needed.

Given these convergence changes, the enterprise market needs better UC-based products and services to replace legacy telephony technologies. For example, it will be inefficient for outbound application notifications to function simply as “Proactive IVR,” since outbound contacts from a business process application will have to capitalize on personalized, mobile “smart-phone” accessibility through mobile UC, not traditional, location-based phone call attempts that rely on the limitations of voice-only interactions.

Instead, consider starting with immediate delivery of a mobile notification message of any kind from a business application service to an end user, followed by the user’s option to access a multimodal portal that offers the recipient choices of automated self-service interaction (voice or online input/output), along with live assistance access options (chat, voice, video). This approach was demonstrated several years ago by Intervoice, since acquired by Convergys. However, the real payoff can now be finally realized from the proliferation of proactive application contacts that will result from the explosion of “smart-phone” usage and “App Store” mobile applications.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Sprint Network Services For Enterprise UC

2009-05-13T21:04:00.002-04:00

May 12, 2009

Sprint Network Services Put “Meat on The Bones” Of Enterprise UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

By now, most of the enterprise market understands what UC technology is basically all about (“Why of UC”) – i.e., enabling individual end users to flexibly communicate easily and cost efficiently anywhere and anyhow to do their jobs faster and better. Not only will end users be more productive, but business operations also become more cost efficient and effective. Because UC involves a significant change in handling phone calls within the context of increased mobility, messaging, and online information access, the biggest challenge to enterprise organizations is how to move forward with their migration to UC.

Sprint Nextel’s announcement this week offers a practical shortcut to business organizations to selectively bridge the gap between existing enterprise communications and the missing elements required for UC. Using their “Now Network” facilities, Sprint has teamed with strategic partners to offer new network services for mobile device support, multi-modal IP networking services (wired, wireless), integration with IP Telephony, Unified Messaging, Instant Messaging and presence management.

Connecting Enterprise Applications, Desktops, and Mobile Users

With the increased growth of wireless communications and multimodal “smart-phones,” business process operations can now support any form of contact that an individual end user requires. Not only does this apply to people within an organization, but also to any external business contacts they deal with (business partners, customers) whose communication facilities are outside the control of the enterprise.

While UC flexibility is useful at the desktop, it’s greatest value is when it is combined with the power of mobile accessibility. That is also when users really need the flexibility of choice in communicating with eyes-free, hands free speech, silent screen interactions and text messages, or video interactions. Without the combination of mobile access and choice of communication modality, operational time delays of “human contact latency” can seriously impact high-value business processes and cause missed or delayed revenues, serious financial loss, and even loss of human life.

Such concerns are no longer just about traditional person-to-person contacts. As business processes become more automated and monitor operational workflows, they too need to proactively and selectively notify responsible people of any situations that require awareness, decision-making, or action taking by people. Those people, in turn, therefore need to be as communication-accessible as possible in order to be responsive to such operational situations, especially if they are time critical. That’s where mobility and UC services are needed most.

Mix and Match - Sprint “Now Network” Services Will Connect People, Networks, And Enterprise UC Applications

In Monday’s announcement, Sprint revealed the integration of it’s comprehensive 3G and 4G, SIP-enabled, wired and wireless “Now Network” facilities with UC technologies provided by industry leaders Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco for enterprise-based Instant Messaging, Email, and IP Telephony. Their new service can help close the gap and speed up the migration from legacy PSTN TDM voice applications to IP-based, interoperable UC applications. In addition, Sprint’s UC solution can also open new avenues for enterprise business applications to access and interact with different types of end users, but still be efficiently managed and controlled by individual enterprise operations.

Sprint emphasized its use of SIP trunking over an MPLS network for its IP Telephony (VoIP) service offerings and interoperability with the PSTN network, as well as with enterprise IP Telephony networks. In addition, Sprint will initially provide Mobile Integration to support their subscribers’ Sprint CDMA phones in a Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) business environment. As the smart-phone market continues to explode, we would expect the service to become more open and device independent, as well as support “dual persona” mobile devices. That is where the UC action will really explode for all kinds of communication services and where we expect all network operators to follow Sprint’s lead to compete for mobile subscribers and enterprise applications access.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Siemens Gets Ready For UC Enterprise Battles

2009-04-27T13:13:00.002-04:00

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

April 27, 2009

Siemens Sales Strategies For The New UC Markets

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN Group) new executive team discussed how they are addressing the changing needs of the global UC market that will absorb traditional premise-based telephony. As already reflected by competitive announcements from other leading UC technology providers, such as Avaya’s Aura, the Siemens announcement highlighted the need to support existing telephony investments while offering new “open,” IP-based application software for UC.

Key changes in marketing strategies mentioned by CEO James O’Neill and President of Sales Mark Vayda included the following:

Global approach to sales and marketing
Exploit “Cloud Computing” – Hosted/Managed services
Software based, real-time telephony applications expertise
Targeting key vertical markets such as Government, Health care, Education, Utilities, in major geographical area
Shift of emphasis to channel-based sales, coupled with strategic direct sales activities
Channels to include System Integrators, Carriers, VARs, Service Providers, etc.
Device independence for end users (wired, wireless)

While this initial videocast covered some general organizational strategies for sales and marketing, there wasn’t enough time to address some more specific hard questions about products and services that would have to compete in the new UC market place.

Siemens is aggressively reorganizing its sales and marketing organization with new incentives and new staff to support the shift to software, services, and partnering strategies that UC implementations will require. Both O’Neill and Vayda lay claim to their successful experience in the software and services business with Oracle Corporation.

The challenge of migrating from legacy telephony to UC, IP Telephony, and mobile technologies will be the same for the entire industry, The question is how quickly will the technology and service providers get their acts together and offer flexible and future-proof solutions to meet many different customer needs.

What Do You Think?
Contact me at artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360

UC And The Future of Desktop Telephony

2009-04-05T12:04:00.007-04:00

Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
April 5, 2009

The Real Message From VoiceCon – How To Prepare For Enterprise Desktop Telephony “End-of-Life”

Unfortunately, a fractured foot kept me from attending the Spring VoiceCon show as planned, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t see and hear the important messages that were delivered there. Needless to say, from a “vision” perspective, those messages are no real surprise any more. What we are finally seeing are practical products and services that will help enterprise IT to start selectively planning and delivering IP Telephony and UC applications, based upon real demand from both individual end users and specific, high-value business processes.

There is no question about where new telephony technology (IP Telephony) is going, from both a business and consumer (customer) user perspective. It will become an integrated UC application to make voice contact with people more flexible and efficient, “anywhere, any time, any way.” UC, in turn, will be integrated with all aspects of information access and information exchange, often referred to as “collaboration.” While direct access to information has become increasingly easy with web search facilities and portals, making real-time contact with people still remains a challenge that UC and presence management technology is helping to simplify.

To attain such objectives:

·IP telephony functions will be software-driven and personalized

·IP telephony usage will be location, device and network independent

·UC device (smartphone, softphone) interfaces will exploit screen, keyboard, and speech interfaces instead of the legacy Touch-Tone keypad. This will enable person-to-person communications to be device-independent, multi-modal, cross-media, and trans-modal (switching between real-time contacts and messaging)

·UC will facilitate both person-to-person and process (application)-to-person contact initiation, thus making business processes more proactive (via CEBP integrations), flexible, and efficient for real-time operational performance management

The real challenge to enterprise IT management or third-party support services is how they should be migrating from current legacy telephony technology to the new and more complex UC-IP Telephony world of the future.

The “End of Life” Strategy of UC Implementation Planning

Unfortunately, every level of telephony communication technology will be affected by the convergence and integration requirements of UC. This means that changing legacy architectures, products, and old telecom perspectives will be necessary to deal with all the changes that will be evolving, even if the new technology were free! So the main message today from vendors attacking the upcoming UC market is to start the migration selectively with existing applications that can be updated with minimal disruption and costs. In addition, they will all offer expertise and consulting services to help inexperienced IT organizations plan and cost justify practical implementations.

With today’s economy forcing everyone to control technology spending as much as possible, the potential of lower costs and increased people/process productivity may not be enough to justify customer UC movement. This is particularly true when there is not enough “demand” from Line of Business management or individual end users of the technology who just may not be aware of the benefits they will gain from UC (UC-B, UC-U).

However, what is starting to force the issue of moving forward with UC, is the growing need to replace existing “end-of-life” enterprise technologies that are not only getting more expensive to maintain, but cannot be simply replaced with old technology. Needless to say, everything that is old and TDM telephony based, falls into this category, including desktop telephones, PBXs, TDM trunking, key systems, voice mail systems, call center systems, etc.

Growing use of personalized, mobile phones for increased accessibility is adding another driver for the need for UC flexibility. Throw in the fact that mobile and desktop smartphones, as well as PC-based softphones, can minimize the need to buy traditional and limited desktop phones, and you have a new ballgame for UC implementation planning. What is also complicating matters for enterprise IP Telephony planning perhaps even more, is the fact that IP-based, hosted/ managed services offer new implementation alternatives as opposed to traditional premise-based ownership.

Bottom Line For Enterprise IT In UC Planning

They can’t really do it by themselves! They will need to find the new requirements for UC applications and the business priorities for those requirements, before they can even start looking at the new UC products and services that are being announced daily.
What will also make it hard for the move to IP telephony and UC is that UC is not just about voice telephony, and the “elephants in the room” already are text messaging technologies (email, IM, SMS) and the myriad of online business process applications that are ready to exploit CEPB (communications enabled business process) capabilities to initiate automated notifications or contextual person-to-person telephone contacts. The aggressive presence of Microsoft and IBM at VoiceCon underscored their interest in enterprise UC/IP Telephony migrations.

So, it is interesting to see the kind of long-overdue architectural changes that leading telephony providers like Avaya are making to migrate their customers to IP Telephony in the UC marketplace. Open, real-time communication application software, rather than just desktop hardware, along with integrations with business process applications is obviously the new focus of their UC game. But it’s also obvious that they can’t just sell telephone systems separately anymore, so look for more teamwork between the operating systems providers, the desktop application providers, and the communication providers.

Which vendor will lead the UC migration? Who knows!

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or .

Drilling Down On UC Productivity

2009-03-24T18:56:00.003-04:00

Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
March 24, 2009

UC Productivity , People "Accessibility”, and the Death of “Dumb” Touch-Tone Telephones

The basic objective of business communications is to improve accessibility to both people and information. The Internet and the World Wide Web has already made tremendous inroads in providing “virtualized” search and access to information, so the remaining challenge is to maximize similar ease of access to people. That is the fundamental objective of unified communications (UC), whether it is “person-to-person” or (automated) “process-to-person.” Conversational voice telephony is not going to disappear from the UC picture, in fact it may increase significantly because it may become easier. However, how people will be initiating and responding to phone contacts will certainly be changing.

The birth pains of UC, however, are deeply entwined with the migration of legacy, voice-centric TDM telephony to converged IP-based telephony and the media flexibility of multi-modal “smart-phones.” Disruptive changes have started taking place at all layers of business communication technology and usage, ranging from wired and wireless network infrastructures to “cloud-based” communication applications to new forms of end point communication devices. As UC-based services extend more flexible communications access beyond the boundaries of location, organization, networks, and devices, they have started to threaten the legacy telephony technologies of both enterprise organizations and service providers.

Communication “Availability” vs. “Accessibility”

While presence-based “availability” has been a differentiating factor in supporting the productivity benefits of UC for “person-to-person” contacts, it should not be confused with contact “accessibility.” Being “accessible” doesn’t necessarily mean being “available” for a voice conversation, but the reverse is also true - being “available” doesn’t necessarily mean being “accessible.”

To have a real-time interaction with a person, it will be necessary for that person to be both “available” and “accessible.” On the other hand, it will be sufficient to be just “accessible” to communicate via all forms of messaging. As messaging activity increasingly dominates business and social contact activities, the need to maximize individual user “accessibility” via more flexible endpoint devices will become universal.

Maximizing People “Accessibility” With Mobile, Multi-modal Devices

What triggered this article is the acknowledgement in the industry press that personalized, multi-modal mobility and “smart phones” will take over business communications the same way it is taking over the consumer market. What that means is that the business telephone, as we have long known it, is going to change dramatically into a flexible, multimodal, computerized device that can accommodate more than voice conversations. Not only will such devices allow efficient visual access to information from web-based portals, but they will also allow telephony functions to integrate “contextually” and seamlessly with all forms of screen-based text messaging and business applications.

It is therefore necessary for enterprise organizations to “cut to the chase” and start planning and prioritizing how their existing telephony technologies must slowly change to maximize the operational business benefits of UC and how such changes will include prioritizing the different UC needs of individual “end users.” The flexibility of mobile or desktop “smart-phones” coupled with UC, can maximize individual end user accessibility and productivity, as well as associated business process performance. Depending upon the contact needs of specific end users, however, the UC ROI “bottom line” will be heavily dependent upon the replacement of “dumb,” voice-only telephones as a primary communication device wherever they are used!

The confusion for IT management that has long surrounded the definition of “unified communications” because of the convergence of its different technology components is now also hitting the definition of mobile “smart phones” (Read Matt Hamblen's post at: http://www.infoworld.com/news/feeds/09/03/16/Cell-phone--smartphone----whats-the-difference.html?source=gs)

See also what is now being labeled as “media phones” for the wired desktop. The software elements of “smart-phones” are like PCs and laptops, ranging from mobile operating systems to software clients to a variety of business and consumer applications that must support different user interface options and device form factors. All of this makes the choice of devices more personalized and complex, rather than a “one-size fits all” that an enterprise could supply in the past to employees.

What Does That Mean To Enterprise IT?

While individual end users and their job responsibilities will determine what endpoint devices they will carry with them for all their person-to-person communication needs, there will still be other enterprise responsibilities that IT will have to fulfill. These will include the need to cost-effectively support all business communication activities, including business “process-to-person” contacts and information access.

For openers, all forms of communications will generate traffic that needs to be supported by adequate broadband network capacity, both wired and wireless. Because of mobile access and contacts with customers or business partners, such connections will extend beyond the domain of enterprise controlled private networks. On the other hand, automated business process application contacts with end users will require appropriate information access security and integrations between communication applications, better known as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP).

Given the dynamic flexibility of UC-based contacts, usage traffic will vary dynamically from the siloed email and telephone traffic of the past. This will make projections of UC traffic and private network needs difficult to specify in advance, but is especially important for estimating cost savings that can be derived from usage-based hosted UC services.

When it comes to supplying mobile endpoint communication devices, the enterprise will need to shift to supplying business client software, not hardware, for devices that will accommodate both personal/consumer needs and secure business process applications. The term “Dual Persona” has been used to describe this capability for a single device to manage all forms of contact (incoming and outgoing) for a single individual user. This should help support the challenge of “multitasking” between applications, between people relationships, and between job and personal responsibilities.

“Smart-phone” Flexibility and End User Productivity – UC-U = UC-I + UC-R

When it comes to measuring the “soft” user productivity ROI of UC, which looks at individual end user time saved because of ease and speed of communicating, the term “UC-U” has been created. This is differentiated from the business process ROI of “UC-B,” which looks at the total performance of a business process task in terms of elapsed time and quality, and is dependent to some extent on UC-U benefits that can be very dependent upon endpoint device UC flexibility that mobile and desktop “smart-phones” can provide.

But we really must look at UC-U from the two user roles in communications, the “initiator” and the “recipient/respondent” roles. Each role has its functional needs that must be supported by flexible application, network, and device capabilities to achieve end-to-end efficiency and effectiveness. So, when evaluating all the pieces in a UC solution or service, the productivity benefit for contact initiation (UC-I) should be evaluated separately from contact reception/response (UC-R). While most people will need both kinds of capabilities at different times, there will always be business processes where the value of one will be more important than the other. More significantly, it will be necessary to monitor communication activities to insure that end users exploit each type of capability properly to maximize both UC-U and UC-B.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

End User Demand for Business UC? – It’s the Same for Any Size Business

2009-03-02T13:39:00.004-05:00

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As I have frequently pointed out, UC is really all about making timely and flexible contact with people, who are not always accessible or “available” in real time. Business contacts may be both traditional “person-to-person” contacts, as well as “process-to-person” contacts, where automated business application services proactively “notify” (deliver messages) to individual end users/subscribers about something that is important and time-sensitive specifically for them.

In either case, however, the ability of a recipient to be contacted more quickly because of mobile accessibility and/or a flexible choice of communication modalities, makes UC technology useful for both contact initiators and recipients, as well as for the performance of business processes that depend on people to take timely actions.

Up till now, there has been a primary focus by enterprise technology providers on UC infrastructure as a means of reducing support costs, TCO, etc., which is of particular interest to IT management, but not to individual end users or even to business management (LOB) in any size enterprise. While budgets and lower costs are important for management and implementation planning, they are not the real strategic objective for business operations. As I have often questioned, “If you got UC technology for free, what would you do with it?”

UC Surveys Starting To Look At Individual End User Needs

In the past year, there has been a realization that individual business users are really key beneficiaries of UC capabilities, but their communication needs and benefits are not identical. And it is not just about voice communications, either! That means UC implementation planning must be geared selectively to high-value needs of end users (“UC-U”), that, in turn, will also pay off most to the business ROI (“UC-B”). What should be recognized here is that if individual end user needs are not taken care of first, the business processes that depend on those users will suffer, because UC capabilities will not be adopted and exploited effectively.

From that perspective of end user needs as either a contact initiator or contact recipient in the performance of a business process, the size of an organization makes little difference in requirements for those person-to-person or process-to-person communication needs. However, the more individual end users that can significantly benefit from UC capabilities in doing their jobs, the greater the pay off for both the UC-U and UC-B aspects of UC investment ROI.

Siemens started looking at such end user UC needs, by asking them about common communication “pain points” that can be minimized or eliminated by UC technologies. It’s not that what such “pain points” will be a surprise, but rather to understand the relative impact on business process performance.

However, United Business Media did a similar study earlier last year, with somewhat different results, and CMP Media’s bMighty Publisher/Editor, Frederick Paul, compared the results in a bMighty article referenced in his blog. In addition, UC Strategies colleague, Marty Parker, also points out that the real challenge for business organizations is to help do something about those communication “pain point” problems.

Now that the spotlight is upon individual end users, regardless of where they work, it is clear that UC implementation has to help move traditional voice telephony into the converged domain of “virtual” and mobile IP communications, rather than the traditional wired, premise-based TDM networks. This change will also impact the carrier service providers, who have to let go of their “walled gardens” to support the mobile service application needs of both their subscribers (consumers) and business organizations. (More on that later.)

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at artr@ix.netcom.com or .

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

New Response Service For Text Message Recipients

2009-01-20T16:19:00.006-05:00

January 20, 2009

UM/UC Gets Another Boost From SpinVox’s “VoxLinks”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Messaging is an increasingly important component of unified communications (UC) for a number of practical reasons, including the fact that text messaging has become “real-time” through Instant Messaging and mobile SMS, but also because text messages are much more manageable, self-documenting, and resource-efficient than voice messages. Such benefits contribute to the goals of UC to minimize human latency in business communications through individual end user productivity (UC-U) and thereby also increase associated business process efficiencies (UC-B).

However, typing text message input has always been slow and error prone and the holy grail of business messaging has been to use the convenience and efficiency of voice for message input, but the efficiencies of text for message retrieval and management. The first step in this direction took place a couple of years ago when SpinVox, among others, offered a telephone answering service that allowed callers to leave traditional voice messages, but enabled the recipients to retrieve those messages in text form.

What Message Recipients Really Need

There are really two kinds of actions that message recipients have to take when they get notification of a new message:

1. Retrieve the message

2. Respond to the message

Both actions need flexibility to meet individual user needs for handling different kinds of messages and that’s where the power of unified messaging (UM) comes into play for UC. Recipients need to retrieve messages in any form that is convenient for them at the moment, especially when they are mobile, and they also need to respond/reply in any modality that is appropriate. If most people are like me, we respond immediately whenever possible, either to satisfy the time needs of other people as soon as possible or simply because we might forget about it.

Until recently, enterprise “unified messaging” technologies (UM) supported the capability for flexible message retrieval by primarily converting text messages to voice for notification and delivery by a voicemail system. Voice messages were also made a bit more manageable by using an email screen interface for retrieval, but the actual voice message retrieval and voice response had to be supported through a telephone and voicemail system.

SpinVox’s “VoxLinks” Cross-media Message Service For Recipients

SpinVox’s new service addresses the practical needs of the mobile user as a recipient to reply/respond to SMS text messages in voice. Expanding upon the success of it’s original voice-to-text-messaging service offered through wireless carriers, and more recently through enterprise providers like Avaya, VoxLinks provides any transcribed voice message that is delivered by SMS, with a “click-to-reply” voice option, as well as a “click-to-listen” option to hear the original voice message that was transcribed to the received text message. Now recipients can “Have their cake and eat it too!”

SpinVox is planning to bring speech recognition to messaging technologies to provide a variety of public services for mobile users. This should fit in nicely with UC service requirements for “click-to-call” and federated telephony presence management, as well as provide speech interfaces for mobile business applications. The latter should enable speech input to mesh efficiently with visual outputs for mobile devices. However, the proposed services will need to support regulatory compliance for business use and that is something that has not (yet) been publicized. So, stay tuned!

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC and Nortel Bankruptcy

2009-01-19T16:02:00.005-05:00

January 19, 2009

Did Nortel’s Bankruptcy Get Your Attention For Enterprise UC?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The enterprise telephony pundits are all putting their spin on the news that industry leader, Nortel, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. They all say that this is no surprise and it’s not just because Nortel made mistakes.

I also mentioned the first published rumble from Nortel in early December in a comment I wrote to an article on UC. (See what I wrote below. *) Because enterprise telephony technology is being integrated and absorbed into UC and multimodal mobile services are rapidly become available to consumers, the traditional telephony piece parts (endpoint devices, TDM networks, hardware switches, voice applications) will no longer be locked into those premise-based hardware/software solutions that the telecom industry has traditionally served up to the business market.

Blair Pleasant (at UC Strategies.com) took a great stab at trying to clear up the confusion that surrounds the fundamental concepts of “unified communications.” For the record, my own perspective has always focused on benefits for the individual end users of communication technology, which includes:

· Ease of use of endpoint communication devices

· Flexible and efficient modes of contact with people (who can’t always be available or accessible)

· Personalized manageability of all contact activities that are location and device independent

· Reasonable cost effectiveness

Whether for personal (consumer) usage or for business job responsibilities, without those benefits, UC technology will never gain user acceptance and enterprise implementations will never take off or pay off for business process efficiency!

Different Enterprise Constituencies and UC Perspectives

(* Comment on article “W ill the REAL Definition of UC Please Stand Up!”) )

Part of the problem of defining UC rests with the different constituencies involved with the use of UC capabilities. End users don't care about infrastructure requirements, only functionality and ease of use. Business management are primarily concerned with business process performance and operational costs. IT is mainly concerned with implementation and support costs for operational capacity, reliability, and security for network and server infrastructures, satisfying various end user needs and business management's application needs, and managing (control) over what they are responsible for, including software clients on end user endpoint devices.

What UC is changing the most is what Blair highlighted, the role of voice telephony. Not only is traditional telephony importance downshifting to visual interfaces and text content, but the traditional TDM network infrastructure and how it is managed is changing as well (IP telephony, VoIP, wireless mobility).

As Blair mentioned, the latter is having a drastic effect on enterprise telecom, telephone system providers, and the public service providers (carriers). Needless to say, the sales and support channels for all these providers will also be greatly impacted in who they represent and how they will do business with their clients.

Presence - Don’t Confuse Availability With Accessibility!

The one point I would want to clarify is the role of “presence management.” Availability status, from a contact initiation perspective, is primarily needed only for real-time connections, i.e., phone calls, IM, and conferencing. The increasing roles of asynchronous messaging and immediate message delivery (SMS) don't really require such information to be made available to senders. Message originators should be able to send messages whenever they need to, in whatever medium is convenient, and with any type of device, while recipients should have the same flexibility for controlling message delivery, retrieval and responses.

The reliability of location-independent message delivery (plus it's informational attachments) made email equally important with phone calls for business users in a study I reported upon over two years ago. At that time, the study didn't consider IM, so that would add another chunk of communication activity taken out of voice telephony's future role in business communications.

Voice conversations will always remain very important to both personal and business contacts, but the inefficiencies of ad hoc, "blind" call attempts that waste the caller's time can now shift to more efficient, "contextual" ways of initiating a successful call. That is where new federated presence technology will pay off, primarily to contact initiators, both on a person/application-to-person basis, or on a person-to-anyone-who-is- qualified-and-available basis (e.g., live assistance to a customer or any end user).

Changing Enterprise Responsibilities for UC Services/

The migration from current telephony investments that still work presents several challenges to enterprise organizations, primarily about what communication services they should be responsible for, what do they need to change first, who needs those changes, and how should they go about making such changes. I think it is getting very obvious that from an end user perspective, it will start with mobile devices for internal users, business partners, and customers who are involved with high-value business processes.

Mobility has always been the driving force of user demand for the flexibility that UC offers, rather than the desktop. So, to start with what all end users really need most from UC, just look at the role that the enterprise will play in supporting all the new "smart phones' that end users will bring to their work environment and that customers will start using to interact with enterprise portals and customer care staff. Desktop UC is "nice-to-have," but mobile UC will be "got-to-have!"

As Blair pointed out, the traditional telephony system and service providers are quickly trying to shift product gears to support the changing role of location-based, proprietary hardware and software telephony to open, software-based, device-independent UC and mobility.

Today's report that Nortel is considering bankruptcy possibilities is an indication that supporting Microsoft's UC strategies may not have done enough for their future survival. We are still watching how the other leading premise-based, business telephony (PBX) providers are changing (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, etc.) vs. the enterprise premise-based email and IM technology providers (Microsoft, IBM), vs. what the hosted communication service providers are now able to offer.

Since UC covers all the pieces of business communication, including integration with business process applications (CEBP), it will be most interesting to see who ends up doing the business process consulting, solution selling, and technology infrastructure installation and support for the different UC components to fit various individual enterprise migration needs. Look for “UC Teams” of technology and service providers to be required to do the job of UC strategic planning and implementations.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or .

UC and Tradeshows

2009-01-05T16:18:00.003-05:00

January 5, 2009

UC and The Future of Tradeshows

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

It is interesting to see how the big industry players are having an impact on UC evolution, directly or indirectly, and how UC will, in turn, impact how we do business. Apple made a big move when it introduced the iPhone to support consumer UC (although they didn’t say “UC”). They quickly followed up with additional capabilities for business users as well.

Now, Apple seems to be taking the lead in changing the future role of traditional, location-based, shared trade shows and conferences to reach customers. I think UC will play an important role in this trend and, most particularly for the UC market itself. (We do have to “Practice what we preach!”) If you think about it, UC is all about supporting communication needs of individual users "anywhere, any time, anyhow." That includes person-to-person" contacts as well as information delivery to people from business process applications (CEBP). The following are some of my comments to the discussion about the “Death of Tradeshows.”

The “Anywhere” Is Key To “Virtual” Audiences

The "anywhere" is perhaps the biggest change Mobile UC brings to both personal and business communications, because it means that people don't have to be in an "office," at "home," or at a particular location to do their jobs, get information, or make contact with people in any modality they wish.

The "any time" factor, however, must still be managed, because people don't have unlimited time and have different individual priorities and deadlines to meet. That makes presence-based "availability" and "accessibility" key factors for real-time contacts in the UC game.

So, what are trade shows or conferences all about? A place to make contacts and get information! Well, guess what? They just don't always have to be location-based activities any more. The old ploy of time-consuming travel to conferences at enticing, but expensive, plush resorts is going to diminish, along with overloading conferences with so many concurrent presentations and events to maximize audience size, that it is impossible to do anything efficiently.

You might say conferences are a useful way to participate in a presentation, discussion, or round table. Well, there too, it doesn't mean you have to be physically present to do so. In fact, real-time discussions may be less useful than threaded exchanges to allow more thoughtful interactions at the convenience of interested participants.

Perhaps the only justification for location-based presence is where there has to be physical hands-on to a product, say, for an automobile. Otherwise, person-to-person contacts, information access, and demonstrations of business process applications can all be done on an individually personalized basis, remotely, and at any time that is convenient for the customer.

“Virtual” Sessions – Real-time or On demand

I personally started to add "virtual" sessions to existing conferences back in 1995. This allowed remote speakers and audience members to participate selectively in real-time. In one event, I had only 20 people in the room, including a panel of speakers, while over 300 were conferenced in. (Today, that's no big deal!)

Recording these virtual activities enable access to such events after the fact. The bottom line is that "virtual" online sessions expand the scope of participation significantly and at much less cost.

UC technology includes real time voice and video conferencing applications, in addition to person-to-person contacts in any mode required by the individual communicants. By scheduling such events, you can maximize real-time participation and interactions from any location. However, when does it really have to be real time when people are now accessible all the time with asynchronous communications (messaging) and "click-to-contact" for any real time needs?

With the web, our increasingly global environment and mobile/portable devices, many location-based business activities are diminishing, e.g., shopping, education and training, customer service, information access, office work, socializing, business collaboration, etc., so it should be obvious why the time and costs of location-based conferences and trade shows will also succumb to the flexibility of "virtual" online events.

As pointed out about Apple, "virtual" shows don't really have to be shared with all other sponsors; this will help eliminate the "overloaded" schedules that shared-show producers create to maximize physical attendance. (I found that to still be a problem with some new online shared trade shows.) So, although there will still be location-based events, they can also maximize their potential audience by also making them "virtual." As well proven by Google, advertising on the web is more powerful and responsive than just location-based signage.

So, the power of the web, wireless mobility, and UC will be driving the next generation of conferences and trade shows in my book. It will help move all aspects of market access to both people and information to “virtual” audiences in real-time or on-demand. That will help the “greening” of the marketplace and change the way companies do business.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Will the REAL DefinitionS of UC Stand Up: 6 Perspectives For A Single Definition

2008-12-17T00:47:00.009-05:00

David A. Zimmer, PMP
Chief of Staff
American Eagle Group

In a recent article by a colleague titled “Will the REAL Definition of Unified Communications Please Stand Up,” Blair Pleasant offered a definition of unified communications. Overall, I felt the definition provided insight and was comprehensive from a technical perspective. She included the many “moving” parts, the technical components, needed to support a unified communications (UC) infrastructure.

Ms. Pleasant’s real premise of the article was to provide that one definition we can use to effectively describe UC – the “elevator speech” of UC. This is a goal another colleague Art Rosenberg and I have attempted many times over the past decade since we coined the term “unified communications.” No matter what we developed, I always felt short-changed, incomplete, not totally satisfied.

After reading Ms. Pleasant’s article and talking with Art, I came upon the root issue to this lacking definition. We typically attempt to define UC from one perspective which leaves the other perspectives dangling. UC is a rapidly moving, and yet frustratingly slow, whirlwind of needs, wants and whims. A need to one person is simply a whim to another. So, to pin a single definition on UC is fruitless. As soon as we are satisfied with the definition, it is outmoded, just as a PC purchased yesterday is obsolete.

A Departure From UC

Back in 2002 or 2003, I took a departure from the UC market to provide training and consulting to companies in the area of project management and IT service management. Over the past several years, I have trained thousands in industry-standard project management methodologies and proper MS Project use. During these seminars, I refered to unified communications. I’ve learned, based upon the person’s job description, their definition and understanding differs.

Rather than a single definition, I believe there is and always will be multiple definitions. The definitions result from different perspectives. I’ve captured these perspectives in what I call, the UC Cube©. It is a specialized version of the IT Cube© specific for UC although it uses the same perspectives.

What is UC Cube?

Over the years, I have been involved in many IT related projects. During that time, I have observed many perspectives to the project. Some felt the project was a raging success while others, looking at the same information, considered it a flaming failure. Why? I realized they were viewing the situation from different angles.

Imagine a cube – a six sided, 3D object. In the center of cube is the item of scrutiny. Depending upon which panel I am looking through to see the item, I see another aspect, a distinct surface resulting in “seeing the same thing, but differently.”

Let’s tie this to UC.

Any IT project, and UC eventually boils to technology implementation, has six different perspectives. I make some generalities to simplify the concept. There always will be grey areas and bleed-overs to other panels, but the following descriptions will help us understand our conundrum.

Panel 1: The Technician

The technician implements, maintains and upgrades the infrastructure that supports the features and functions of the UC system. He may have insight into only one portion of the overall system. For example, he may be the MS Exchange or Domino Server guru. He may not understand or be concerned with telecom stuff.

Regardless of how narrow or expansive his technical skill set, he is the one that understands the nuts-and-bolts. He must make the adjustments necessary to keep the system alive.

His perspective is technical. His questions and concept of UC is technical.

“What components must I implement and maintain to produce UC?”

“What widgets comprise a UC infrastructure?”

“Should I support VoIP or TDM?”

“What expertise do I need or certification should I possess?”

“What training best serves this area?”

And so on.

Panel 2: The IT or Technology Management

The IT or Technology manager, while concerned with the technology and its implementation, concentrates on uptime, stability, business support, evolution to meet future needs, etc. She reads different reports and magazines than the technician. Her concern is less day-to-day operations and more focused on providing the features/functions with appropriate availability to support the organization.

The IT manager’s perspective will be technical but with a “business” flavor added.

“Which set of technology meets the greatest number of needs expressed with the greatest uptime and lowest cost?”

“Can I prove ROI, TCO, ABC and XYZ the business slings at me?”

“At the end of the day, am I supporting their needs, wants and whims?”

“What metrics best prove I’m meeting my SLAs?”

“How do I really know the users’ needs?”

“Are the business initiatives being met by this latest technology implementation?”

Panel 3: Business Management and Executives

The business management focuses on company profitability, costs and competitiveness. If tin cans and string support the communication need, so be it. If it takes the latest advances and technology, that’s fine as long as it keeps us profitable and competitive. The goal is to manage the business, not the technology to support the company. The business defines the business requirements for profitability and competitiveness while the technology management translates those requirements into working technology.

The business’ view of UC revolves around reaction to market trends, business directions, customer responsiveness and so forth. If technology enables mobility, agility and profitability, they’re for it. Does the UC system integrate with our business processes and support greater productivity so we can do more with less?

While it is the IT manager’s responsibility to prove proper ROI and TCO, the business management factors those values into the equation for the cost of IT support. In other words, if the current system supports the business but doesn’t line-up with an industry definition of unified communication, who cares? If a UC system is implemented but doesn’t support the business, UC is no good. Simple.

The business perspective, therefore, looks at UC’s impact on the business itself and determines which “features and functions” are necessary. If IM does the job, it’s in. If UM doesn’t support profitability, it’s out. Yet, if the workers can get to their email, voicemail, fax and other communications just fine, they have “unified communications.”

Panel 4: The User

The rubber meets the road with the user. The user determines which aspects of UC he uses. Some might use IM. Others might use text/picture messaging from their mobile phone. One set wants iPhone® while the rest want Blackberries®. For business purposes, email and voicemail are required options, but their use might vary. Should we throw in calendaring functions and contact lists? Can they only contain business associates or will they contain family and friends? Does it support “presence” for all contexts so the user knows which device or medium to use?

Some users have a clearly defined boundary between work and personal life while others have no life outside of work – everyone is a potential customer. Some users are highly mobile requiring different types of security and equipment definitions while others might share devices because of their duties such as manufacturing shop floors and support desks.

Since each job varies drastically from one company to another, from one industry to another and from one country to another, a single definition will not suffice. Here’s the key: each user will define UC for himself or herself based upon his or her specific needs and job demands. The person across the aisle may want something completely different. Consequently, the IT staff must support a smorgasbord of features and functions, within limits of course, to cover the variety of definitions.

Which definition prevails? The business manager’s? The IT manager’s? The technician’s? The user’s? All will!

Here’s another aspect of a user, just to muddy the waters. Generational issues. Yup, this is one place age really does matter. Each generation has different ways of working based upon the technology available when they were young.

Not to give away my age, but I much prefer separated technology where my voicemail is voicemail and my email is email. Although I carry a Blackberry fully loaded with pictures, soccer schedules, contact information, email/spam-mail, I don’t do texting. I don’t like IM – too invasive. I don’t want my voicemail comingled with my email and overflowing spam. And my “find me/follow me” is fixed forwarding of my office phone to my mobile number. I don’t need more.

And I really despise presence. Why? Because, frankly, I don’t always want to be available. Worse, just because my mobile phone is on and the presence indicator says I’m available via that method, I’m not. I’ve left it behind because I needed a break. But for many, presence is the coup de grais of UC. Without it, UC isn’t UC!

While I have this older view of the world, my younger counterparts (and off-spring) are suffering carpel tunnel syndrome of the thumbs from texting/IM’ing/video-gaming, and more. They have a different concept of work and play from me. Their communications needs differ.

I have a problem with “communicating” with robots and systems that simulate humans helping me with my tech support while the younger folks like it better. I don’t want to speak to a machine trying to act like a human. I’m not a fan of tech support “live chat” while other love it – too slow and I know I am not the only customer of the tech, therefore, I have to repeat myself too many times and get inaccurate answers.

Therefore, the user defines UC to meet his or her need. It cannot be dictated by the industry.

Panel 5: Analysts and Pundits

The analysts and pundits will have a completely different definition for UC than everyone else – by definition. Our job is to determine the market size, advise our clients what’s best, apprise them of the future after we predict it, and convince them our guesses are just around the corner. Therefore, our definition will be a combination of technical specifications, market forecasts, customer requests and users demands (as determined by surveys). I’m not trying to be harsh, simply reality based.

We will ask,
“What are you current pain points?”

“What problems are you trying to fix?”

“What solutions do you think best fit your situation?”

“How many users do you support?”

“What purchases are forecast for next year, and the year after that, and five years out?”

“What functions do you foresee as important today that you don’t have?”

“What are your predictions for next year?”

We take the information and see how it matches current products and services, then illustrate the current gaps and the market potential. Of course, we have to define the problem we are solving in order to come to a solution. The solution, therefore, evolves into our definition with additional future-proofing. While this is a bit “tongue-in-cheek” of our services, our vision of UC differs from all the other groups, by necessity.

As analysts, we have to stand squarely in the past, the present and the future. The technology must support all three timeframes, the features must meet all needs expressed or at least in a prioritize order of needs, and so forth. Our view and definition of UC can be biased based upon the data collected, the reports read, the information mined and more. The good news is, we can be just as right as any other panel.

Panel 6: The Vendors

The vendors are in business to meet the needs of the customers. Their goal is to understand the definition sufficiently to produce the product or service supporting the definition. Of course, no one vendor can meet the entire definition, therefore, they express how their products/services are UC.

I once saw a vendor claim they had “unified messaging” because they could receive faxes on a PC. It did not integrate with a mailbox, email, voicemail or any other product, but that was their definition of unified messaging – PC fax.

The vendor’s definition of UC will be biased toward their product or service. In many cases, they will fit a square peg in a square hole, but sometimes, it will be more cylindrical than square.

They will be asking questions such as,

“How does our product or service fit this concept of UC?”

“Do we have some aspects that will work so we can make such a claim?”

“Can we state we are UC-compliant?”

And so forth.

Conclusion

Defining UC with a single, industry acceptable definition is impossible. No matter how inclusive, it will certainly exclude some aspect. We must define it from multiple perspectives. We must realize also UC is constantly moving and shifting. There are many moving parts which are evolving at various rates and directions. Users’ needs, wants and whims are never static and change like the wind. Market factors, economic conditions and business climates impact UC quarterly.

The six perspectives give us a clue as to the true complexity of UC. The complexity results from the various viewpoints, more complex than the technical aspect. Serving each angle will challenge us for years to come.

What Do You Think?

Do you think it is possible to have a single definition? Do you think I am accurate in articulating six perspectives? Does the concept of a cube help focus this amorphous collection of needs, wants, whims and technology into something tangible? Send me your thoughts. Either leave a comment to this blog posting or send me an email at info@ameagle.com.

To learn more about my kick-butt Project Management 5-day boot camp or excellently rated MS Project seminars, shoot me an email or call +1/215-491-2544. Thousands have reaped the benefits of more project success from this valuable training.

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