UC and Voice Message Delivery

May 27, 2008

Will UC Change Traditional Voicemail MWI and Message Delivery?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Back in the early days of voice mail, there was a challenge to integrate voice messaging capabilities with proprietary telephone systems. Such integrations concerned enabling the voice messaging system to interoperate with the telephone system in the following areas:

1. Forward calls that did not answer after n rings to the voice mail system (Ring, No Answer) or if set to forward immediately

2. Enable the voice mail system to turn on a Message Waiting Indicator (station set light, stutter dial tone) to notify the device user that there were one or more voice messages waiting to be retrieved.

Back in those early days, however, telephone systems were very “closed” and integration was not readily available. In particular, those phone systems controlled proprietary desktop station sets completely. As a result, early voice mail system developers like Octel had to overcome such integration problems by reverse engineering and emulating proprietary station sets in order to integrate their voice mail systems with those telephone switches.

The problem with the MWI function of the telephone switch, which was usually an indicator light on a telephone set, is that it didn’t tell you too much about the waiting messages, i.e., how many messages you had, who the senders were, the urgency of the messages, etc. Only after the message recipient called into the voicemail system, was some of that information given.

With the growth of mobile devices, “push messaging” notifications and delivery have become practical for all forms of messages (voice and text). What started out with voicemail's outbound delivery of voicemail messages, also enabled email messages to be proactively delivered in real-time, using text-to-speech” technologies under the label of unified messaging (UM). Then email became proactive by moved to “Push email,” inaugurated first by RIM for their enterprise mobile Blackberry servers, then followed by Microsoft Exchange. Now that mobile devices are converging all forms of communications, i.e., becoming “multimodal” under UC for both messaging interfaces and message content, it is time to revamp old voicemail methodologies, especially when your voicemail system is reaching it's end of life!

It has always been very inefficient to retrieve important voice messages because the early voice mail systems played back voice messages in sequential order, since they did not have a visual interface for random access retrieval. The first such capability for voicemail took place with the early desktop integrations with email, where extensions to email software clients included the display of voice messages and online access to the voicemail system to deliver the voice messages through the desktop phone. This was part of the early approach to Unified Messaging (UM). The question now is, do we really have to retrieve and reply to voice messages with a voice interface?

“Visual Voicemail” and Voicemail-to-Text Messaging Services Bringing More Change

As I have been reporting in the past, speech recognition technology is upsetting the traditional voicemail apple cart by removing the constraints on retrieving voice messages through inefficient legacy Telephone User Interfaces (TUIs). This new approach allows a caller to use the phone to conveniently and efficiently leave a voice message as with a traditional voice mail system, but the message recipient doesn’t have to retrieve the message in it’s voice form. With more people using personalized mobile devices, the convenience of voice input for messaging “on the go” will always remain high.

However, no longer will the voice message recipient be limited by the lack of selective, random access to voice messages. What was originally provided only at the desktop through unified messaging (UM) integration with email, has now moved to mobile devices like Apple’s iPhone as “Visual Voicemail.” But, even that has been improved upon by enabling the recipient to also more efficiently “see” voice message content as text, rather than be forced to navigate blindly through voice content and transcribe any important information manually.

This capability to see voice mails in text form will be particularly useful for mobile users who find themselves in a noisy environment or where they have to be “quiet” (e.g., in a meeting or public venue). “Voicemail-to-text” messaging will also speed up the screening of voice messages, since traditional voicemail systems don’t even ask for a “subject line” like email, and even then such information might rarely be accurate.

In addition to those reasons for retrieving voice messages in text form, exploiting a visual screen interface facilitates all UC/UM options of responding to a message by the message recipient, including:

· “Click to call” (or “Call Return” in voicemail systems)

· “Click to Chat” (IM)

· “Click to email” (Reply, Forward)

· “Click to Voicemail” (Reply, Forward)

Where speech interfaces are indeed necessary for hands-free/eyes-free environments (e.g., driving a car), the “Click to” actions will simply become available as intelligent "barge-in" interactive voice commands for initiating and managing calls or messages, rather than the legacy error-prone TUI interfaces that required memorizing complex touch-tone commands.

In the world of business UC we would expect that such new choices of messaging will also be governed by the practical use of presence/availability management. That is, if people are not “available” for a real-time contact, second prize will be a choice of messaging with immediate notification/delivery/response when there is time urgency involved.

What’s The Bottom Line For Business Communications?

What all this really means is that contact recipients will have greater flexibility in being able to respond to other people’s messages when they are just not “available” or “accessible” for a real-time connection. This will translate into faster messaging responses and faster “cycle times” for business process performance, While mobility and the flexibility of UC will increase a recipient’s communication “accessibility,” it will not necessarily increase their “availability” for real-time conversations. (But voice conversations may not be really so necessary any more in light of "real-time messaging!")

SIP–based, "federated" telephony presence management will also shift business calls from traditional “person-to-person” contact attempts to a “person-to-process-to-person” approach. This is where a real-time connection with anyone who is qualified and available can be automatically “orchestrated” by a business process application using presence management technology. This is what internal customer call centers have done for years with self-service IVR applications and telephones, but will now become part of all forms of business communication through both open online Web and IP telephony real-time services.

However, rather than waste time in a queue always waiting for a live person, callers can also take advantage of leaving a message (to identify why they are calling) and the ability for a business process application to screen such input and orchestrate a real-time response (callback or IM) “as soon as possible” when all parties are both “available” and “accessible” for a voice or video conversation This will make such real-time contacts more time efficient for both contact initiators and recipients, especially when they are mobile. Most importantly, please note that all parties won't have to be in the same location or the same organization to exploit such communication services.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or .

Confused About Implementing “UC?”

The experts at UCStrategies.com just published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically migrate current business communications to UC. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

What Do You Think?

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

UC is More Than IP Telephony

May 7, 2008

Confusion About IP Telephony vs. UC vs. Mobility vs. CEBP

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Because the transition of telephony to IP-based connections is causing the most disruption in the technology industry, it is causing many people to think that IP Telephony is the only important piece of unified communications (UM), and ignores the role of messaging and information exchange as key elements of UC. This biased perception was reflected in a pundit’s review of highlights from the recent Interop show this month, which catered primarily to enterprise IT infrastructure folks. However, there were a couple of good sessions that I attended that focused on UC, mobility, and CEBP.

I commented on the criticisms that Nathan Swartz offered about UC, and reprinting it here as well, because UC is not simply about enabling traditional business telephone usage to continue as it did in the TDM environment, but to move forward as a more efficient component of a UC environment. That means that people will be initiating telephone calls differently and will be exploiting multimodal UC interfaces differently than with legacy telephone devices and TUIs.

Response to “Lippis Report Issue 105: What I Learned At Interop”

1. Art Rosenberg Says:
   May 7th, 2008 at 7:29 am

Nathan,

How off-base can you get about what unified communications is all about?

I can’t really blame you for confusing “unified communications” with IP Telephony (IPT), because the biggest change in technology and business communications is taking place with the role of business phone calls. Not only is the network infrastructure for voice telephony changing (VoIP), and the user interfaces moving away from the limitations of the TUI to richer, screen-based flexibility, but the use of more intelligent presence and availability and the seamless interoperability between all forms of messaging and information exchange with conversational voice contacts, will make for more flexible and efficient business operations.

Voice telephony is no longer the only form of real-time, long distance communications, and it has always been a location-based connection, rather than a person or role-based form of contact. In business, the latter is becoming recognized as the real objective for real-time person-to-person contacts, as opposed to socializing. With presence-based IM, text messaging and information exchange have also become real-time, but also allow escalation to the efficiencies of voice conversation once a successful contact has been efficiently established.

Changing TDM telephony to SIP-based IP Telephony is a migration step towards unified communications, but it is not going to replace the increasing dominance and rich efficiencies of both real-time and asynchronous forms of messaging in business communications and information exchange.

Respectfully,

Art Rosenberg
The Unified-View

2. Art Rosenberg Says:
   May 7th, 2008 at 7:54 am

I should also point out that moving to applications-based contact initiation via “CEBP” is another step in the right direction of UC. This is where a business process needs to contact a person, and, believe me, its not with a voice conversation, but with messaging (with voice or text interfaces) and online interactions. The business process application may also intelligently coordinate a voice conference with other people when necessary, based on presence, availability, calendars, etc. This where the Internet and mobile devices will enable notifications (messages) to be delivered to people wherever they happen to be, along with real-time, contextual response links.

So CEBP is simply an extension of UC in allowing applications to also efficiently contact people and deliver information in real-time through messaging. The problem that UC is really trying to solve is making contact with people as flexibly and time-efficiently as possible. Telephony alone could never do that!

What Do You Think?

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

Confused About Implementing “UC?”

The experts at UCStrategies.com just published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically migrate current business communications to UC. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

Real Business ROI For Mobile UC Not From Knowledge Workers

April 28, 2008

Who Generates Real ROI From Mobile UC? “Action-takers!”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Now that the telecommunications industry has finally started focusing on business process efficiencies and people productivity, rather than just cost reductions, it’s also time to look at which kinds of people will generate the most “productivity ROI” from UC for the typical business organization.

I think the market has also moved past individual productivity as the most important UC metric for business organizations for a number of reasons:

· It will vary from user to user, depending on job responsibilities and work environments

· It is not really that significant to enterprise business processes

· No guarantee that personal time savings will ever be passed on to the enterprise

However, personal timesaving benefits are indeed important for end user adoption of new UC capabilities.

So, now the UC migration focus is on business process benefits, which, by definition, means “group productivity,” where everyone involved in a business process task has to communicate efficiently, either as a contact initiator or a contact recipient/respondent. Who ever is not communicating efficiently, becomes the weak link in the business process chain!

Everyone is a “Knowledge/Information’ worker, but not everyone is an “Action-taker”

There was a concerted effort by industry pundits to focus on end users who were involved in business process performance who could supply important information in a timely manner, i.e., they could be contacted and respond very quickly to information requests. While it is true that such capability is important, I believe everyone involved in a business process can contribute information to the business process flow, not just subject matter experts. Everyone is really an information worker/user.

If you think about it, particularly in the context of revenue-sensitive customer-initiated contacts, customer input is the prerequisite for all further actions. Taking it a step further, if there is indeed any significant actions to be taken, including both decision-making and service deliveries, we will find those kinds of “action-takers” to be more mobile and less available at a desktop. So, in order to successfully complete that type of customer-facing business process, desktop UC will not be adequate and Mobile UC flexibility comes into play.

That is one of the reasons that mobile communications have been increasing so rapidly for business users. It has also become a source of concern for IT management, since they cannot easily control what end users will carry with them nor the seamless interoperability between fixed (wired enterprise-controlled desktops and mobile devices and services. Those challenges are slowly being resolved through both technology interoperability and evolving more strategic business relationships between the enterprise and wireless carriers. (See Michael Finneran’s comments on FMC.)

In the meantime, it will become important to focus on the mobility needs of customer-facing “action-takers,” not just “knowledge workers,” who will be key to successful completion of revenue-generating or loss prevention business processes. For practical UC migration planning, find out who your “action-takers” are and what they are doing today for efficient communication access while mobile. That will help define your real UC implementation priorities.

P.S. Your "action-takers" will very often NOT be within your organization - think delivery services, local technology support channels, etc. So, make sure that they are "federated" with your organization's UC capabilities and presence management facilities!

What Do You Think?

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

Confused About Implementing “UC?”

The experts at UCStrategies.com just published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically migrate current business communications to UC. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

AVAYA Comments on Mobile UC Security Approach

In response to my previous post and the reference to implementing application security for UC and multimodal smart-phone devices, Andy Zmolek, Avaya Sr. Mgr. for Security Planning and Strategy, sent in this comment.

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We believe that the most important security for unified communications will reside at the application layer. The most powerful communications scenarios need to tie together three elements: identity, i.e. who's involved in the communication; presence and availability, i.e. can and how should we communicate; and a reasonable policy, i.e.who's allowed to see one's presence, who is allowed to connect to my servers.

Trying to make those kind of increasingly fine-grained decisions at a firewall or IP network device in a way that works with real-time communications is not going to lead to a scalable or user-friendly experience. So while network-based and border-oriented solutions can work well as a temporary solution, they will ultimately prove to be too brittle to meet the security needs of broadly-deployed unified communications solutions.

We also find that many IT organizations are not operationally ready to integrate their directory and identity systems into their communication systems, although we've been supporting that capability for several years in many of our products. Mobile devices like the iPhone are replaying the same battles that IT organizations had in the mainframe era with the emergence of the PC: that same desire for central control and approval of communications device hardware is just as doomed as that era's fight to preserve the mainframe as the only approved platform for programming and computing.

Successful IT shops will embrace and find appropriate ways to protect that mobile infrastructure just as they have done for the PC. And yes, while it’s a difficult job, who would argue that businesses would run more effectively without PCs - the same process is now happening with mobile devices.

Andy Zmolek, AVAYA
Senior Manager,
Security Planning and Strategy

Mobile UC and Business Applications Security

April 18, 2008

Will Security Hold Up Mobile UC Applications For The Enterprise?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Two recent articles on the web caught my attention because they focused on a key concern of IT management about security as it affects business communications in the enterprise. The first article, by Michael Ybarra, reports on the negative reaction of IT management to end user demand for mobile smart phones, where security concerns are given as reasons for limiting support for such devices that will be essential to UC.

Part of the reluctance to allow the use of smartphones by business users seems to be simply because IT thinks it has to fund the purchase, complete user support of the device, as well as the security of any enterprise information that is accessed by the device. In effect, they view the mobile devices just like premise-based, wired desktop PC and telephones. However, because end user demand for mobile “smartphones” has heated up significantly, IT is caught in the middle of changing needs that will also be critical for maximizing UC benefits.

When enterprise-oriented RIM Blackberries, supported by secure enterprise servers, were the only game in town for “push” enterprise email and application messaging, enterprise IT had control over pretty much everything that end users did with those devices. Adding telephony access to the RIM devices “glued” the voice and data pieces together at the mobile device level, although not necessarily in a fully integrated “UC” manner. When Apple jumped into the mobile communications market with its innovative iPhone, the battle for the hearts and minds of both consumers and business users began.

According to the article, one CIO said that a big challenge is keeping up with the latest mobile devices that end users want. “I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me wanting an iPhone. It’s not what we support. WE give them the tools to support their job and environment.”

Those tools could become simpler to manage if they were software based and controllable for enterprise use, both from a security perspective as well as from an interoperability perspective. Apple is now playing catch-up with RIM with its iPhone upgrades for controlling device usage and working with Microsoft’s Exchange software. So, it is just a matter of time that the client and server software will handle the basic enterprise messaging requirements for iPhone users.

The other side of the UC coin however has to do with using the same device for business process applications, and that’s where the second article addresses the need to change enterprise security from the network level to the application software servers.

Where Will The Information Access Security Be Enforced?

The second article, an interview with Internet security expert Ted Schlein, makes the point that enterprise security responsibilities really belong at the application software level to protect proprietary company information, not at the network hardware level. The article claims that the biggest obstacle in pursuing this software approach to network security is simply” inertia.”

Just like business communications are no longer just location based, business information, accessible through business process applications, is also no longer restricted to a single type of network access or just to internal, intra-enterprise staff. To preserve both device and access flexibility for different types of end users, enterprise security has to be selectively enforced at the information source level.

According to Schlein, “ We need to change who is providing the defenses and how we provide the defenses. In the past, the “who” part was the network operations guys, and they basically put in a box to stop malicious data packets….In (the) future, software engineers have to be responsible for security. Engineering principles have to be built into security and applied by the people creating the software.”

Such an approach, which is done from the “inside out,” could eliminate the need for firewalls and intrusion detection systems, etc., and allow business process applications to selectively and consistently secure their content to different types of users and different modes of access.

As enterprise business applications become more distributed and “virtual” with the likes of software implementation frameworks like SAAS and SOA, the enterprise network “walls” will not be adequate to control the security of information that must flow directly to people outside of the business organization, i.e., supply side partners, sales channels, and, most importantly, customers. So, although legacy application software is not yet ready to take on this responsibility, it is yet another area of software changes that the vision of UC will require.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or .

Confused About Implementing “UC?”

The experts at UCStrategies.com just published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically migrate current business communications to UC. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

April 16, 2008

Does Voicemail-to-Text Message Service Need Expensive Transcriptionists?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Recent press headlines have highlighted the fact that text messaging is increasingly dominating personal communications. That includes both person-to-person contacts via email and Instant Messaging, as well as business process applications that deliver information or important, time-critical notifications to people.

In fact, two recent federal government initiatives will only reinforce the trend towards text messaging and the need for the flexibility of UC and UM.

1. The FCC approved a plan for a voluntary mobile phone emergency alert system for use by wireless carriers to supplement legacy public broadcasting services. This will enable more delivery of such public warnings to personal mobile devices. Needless to say, more personalized notifications by business applications will also rely on text messaging, which can always be listened to through Text-to-Speech technology by the recipient, whenever necessary.

The key points of such a plan are:

a. Emergency notifications will originate from automated detection functions

b. Must target individual end users without unnecessarily disturbing non-affected users

c. Must be deliverable in a timely manner regardless of location

d. Must enable response by the notification recipient in a timely manner regardless of location and device modality

2. A new bill was introduced in the House of Representatives banning the use of mobile devices for voice calls on U.S. airplanes while in flight. This bill, called the “HANG UP” act will spare fellow passengers from the “noisome disruption” of mobile conversations that cash-strapped airlines will be tempted to sell. However, text messaging and email access will be allowed.

So, retrieving voice mail messages in text form will fit in nicely with these other text messaging activities. The question, however, is how accurate do the transcriptions have to be and much will such a service cost?

Human Transcription of Voice Mails?

As I pointed out in my last article on the subject, there are many reasons why automatic speech recognition (ASR) will never be perfect for voice messaging, especially from mobile callers, including:

· Unusual words

· Strange dialects and accents

· Noisy environments

· Poor connections with mobile devices

However, consumer voice mail doesn’t really justify the expense of manual transcriptionists, according to long-time speech recognition expert, Walt Tetschner. Walt commented on the use of manual transcriptionists in his March issue of ASRNews as follows:

“The approach that is being used by companies such as SpinVox, SimulScribe and Nuance are flawed and destined for failure. Voicemail-to-text is a very nice convenience feature that will find some solid utilization, but only at a price that is significantly lower than what can be achieved with VM transcriptions that involve human transcriptionists.”

CallWave’s “Gisting” Technology approach makes sense: The transcription of voicemail with commercially available speech recognizers yield word error rates in the 30% to 40% range (for typical VM messages). This means that any reliable word-by-word transcription service for voicemail would require human transcriptionists to scan, verify and correct the automated output. A large human effort would introduce a large cost, which would grow linearly with adoption of the service, and therefore would almost certainly not be scalable for a volume rollout with a telecom carrier”.

“The CallWave approach appears to be using speech recognition properly. It analyzes the voice mail message and extracts the “gist” of the message. This is precisely what users want. They want immediate notification that they received a voicemail, who it was from, and information that would permit the user to prioritize the message and respond appropriately. It does the VM-to-Text conversion without the use of human transcriptionists. This not only eliminates the cost of the human transcriptionists, but also delivers what the users want.”

Incidentally, the option for the recipient to selectively listen directly to any important message segment that could not be translated will always be useful for the exception cases.

What Do You Think?

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

Confused About Implementing “UC?”

The experts at UCStrategies.com just published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

Voicemail-to-Text Services Picking Up Steam

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

April 3, 2008

Will Voicemail-to-Text Messaging Services Close the Recipient’s Loop For Enterprise Unified Messaging?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The experts at UCStrategies.com just published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC, which are primarily:

1. Real-time calls and conferencing (Person-to-person, customer contacts)
2. All forms of asynchronous and real-time multimedia messaging
3. Communications-enabled applications (Automated applications that act as “contact initiators” to individual people)
4. The use of presence management technology to intelligently initiate a mode of contact and communication based on the accessibility and availability of the recipient(s)
5. The ability for users to dynamically and easily move between the different forms of contact as the situation requires and allows.

From an end user perspective, UC’s objective is to enable complete user flexibility as either a contact initiator or contact recipient/respondent by enabling them to individually and independently choose any mode of communication at any time. If all parties want a real-time conversation, they can immediately activate or schedule a voice/video conference call, or initiate what I have termed an “as soon as possible,” (ASAP) call. The practical alternative would be any form of messaging that the contact initiator chooses, without worrying about how the recipient will get the message. That would bring into play the practical flexibility of unified messaging capabilities.

For business and service users, automated applications will also act as contact initiators by generating asynchronous messages that need to be delivered in the medium of the recipient’s choice (voice, text, image). Just as email and Instant Messaging enable online interactions with online “click-to” options, messages from a business process or service application can also provide access to either self-service applications (voice or visual), a simple structured message response in voice or text, or, if necessary, to live assistance (“click-to-call,” “click-to-chat,” “ click-to-message”). Such flexibility is geared to quickly notifying a user about an issue and minimizing “human contact latency” wherever possible.

The Problems With Voice Mail Messaging

UC technologies are still evolving by looking at the operational problems that end users have with legacy communication applications and eliminating or minimizing such problems by exploiting converged interfaces and functions. Even though legacy voice mail systems helped eliminate those paper “pink slips” that “message desk” staff used to transcribe an error-prone and often delayed telephone message (name, number, and cryptic “message”) user voice message retrieval and management was not very efficient with only the traditional Telephone User Interface (Touch-Tone command inputs and voice outputs).

Unified Messaging addressed the need converge the management of email and voice mail messages in several ways, including combining all forms of messaging into a single mailbox, enabling message retrieval to convert text messages to voice for retrieved with a telephone interface, and, with extending a screen-based email interface to include “visual voice mail” to selectively listen and dispose of specific voice messages from a screen GUI, rather than learn to navigate TUI Touch-Tone commands.

However, “visual voice mail” doesn’t really address the basic inefficiency of navigating through voice message content, i.e., having to skip backwards and forwards to repeat certain parts because they were hard to understand or needed to be transcribed as text notes. These are problems that text messages don’t have because the full message is immediately displayed, can be scanned quickly on a screen, stays visible as long as necessary, can be printed, copied and forwarded easily, can be archived for easy search and regulatory compliance, and doesn’t require the storage or the network bandwidth that voice messages do.

Voicemail-to-Text Message Transcription Services to the Rescue?

To minimize those problems, the next phase of unified messaging technology has already appeared in the form of voicemail-to-text message automated transcription services. Using the power of mature speech recognition, coupled with human transcription services to handle “exception” cases, voice messages can be quickly converted to text email or SMS messages before delivery to the recipients. This will typically be a service subscribed to by a voice message recipient, not a voice message originator, although the latter may also be a useful service option in the future.

Because the convenience of speech input is particularly important for eyes-free/hands-free input with handheld mobile devices, there have been a number of noteworthy announcements about voicemail-to-text messaging in conjunction with the big CTIA show. These included:

· New partnering announcements with telephony service providers from voicemail-to-text message developers Spinvox and SimulScribe

· A Senior Cisco executive joining the board of CallWave, which offers Vtxt services that delivers the “gist” of a voice message as a text message

· Last, but not least, the entry of leading speech recognition developer, Nuance, into the Voicemail-to-Text Message services market through major carriers

http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/hot-topics/ip-transition-enterprise/articles/5309-fading-away-the-tui-long-live-visual-call.htm

Voicemail-to-text technology can’t be perfect because of the difficulties in understanding speech in different dialects and varying voice qualities. So, although automatic speech recognition technology (ASR) is used for the bulk of the transcription, manual transcription is brought into play when ASR runs into any kind of problem. In addition, the original voice message recording is also available for selective access by the service subscriber.

Underscoring Nuance’s entry into the Voicemail-to-Text service business, their announcement highlights their use of over 3,000 Nuance transcriptionists in a centralized Nuance facility. Since this clearly a responsibility that enterprise organizations won’t want to do themselves, it is clear that this chunk of unified messaging is another piece of the UC puzzle that will exploit outsourced, hosted services.

What Do You Think?

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

How Will Your Organization Use UC? New UC eBook

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

April 1, 2008

So You Think You Know What “UC” Really Means – Then What?

Read The New UC eBook!

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

It seems that the business communications headlines are continuously talking about new developments in IP telephony and UC, as the traditional voice and button telephone morphs into a screen-enabled multimodal UC device. That could be a desktop PC, a portable laptop combined with a cell phone, or a new “smart-phone.” These new devices are exploiting the converged IP networks, wired and wireless, that are knocking down the walls of legacy communication silos between telephony voice conversations, messaging, and information access.

While the business and consumer worlds watches this transition taking place, they are certainly confused as to what it will all mean to them as users of the new “UC” technologies. IT management is also confused, because, although they understand the fundamental technology change issues at the various infrastructure levels of the networks, application servers, and endpoint software clients, they don’t really know how that will change business process interactions at both the “person-to-person” and “process-to-person” levels.

In the meantime, business technology providers are scrambling to identify themselves as supporting migration to UC capabilities in one way or another. This may be with “VoIP” network connections and management, desktop and mobile telephony, unified messaging (UM), and presence-based real-time person-to-person contacts. More recently, business UC technologies have targeted communications-enabled business process (CEBP) applications that can exploit presence and UC flexibility to directly initiate and coordinate real-time contacts with specific individuals (what I call “people I/O”). UC is definitely not a “one size fits all” technology, and the name of the game is both business process customization and individual user, device-independent personalization.

So, understanding both the functionality of UC, as well as the benefits to individual end users, “groups” of end users inside and outside an enterprise, and to business processes, is a prerequisite to moving forward with any kind of implementation planning. The big planning challenge is to identify operational business priorities for the organization, in order to provide a practical requirements “roadmap” for strategically migrating critical telephony technologies into a UC environment. That is not something that IT departments can do and it won’t be simple or easy for business management either!

The industry-recognized thought leaders and experts at UCStrategies.com, have teamed up to create a very objective and useful “eBook” about business UC that goes beyond the superficial UC hype and infrastructure issues into how business organizations need to approach the challenge and benefits of UC applications. If nothing else, it will clarify your understanding of what UC is all about and give you a dose of reality to move forward in strategically and selectively implementing any key piece of the evolving UC puzzle.

And this is not an “April Fool’s” joke!

What Do You Think?

Let us know your comments and opinions by sending them to artr@ix.netcom.com

"Two Number Accessibility" For FMC and UC

UC Commentary – January 28, 2008

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Business UC Users Need “Two-Number Accessibility” For Mobile Devices and FMC Services

I want to welcome a new contributor to UCStrategies.com, long time contributor to BCR magazine and an expert in wireless communications, Michael Finneran, In particular, his objective white paper on Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) options for the enterprise deserves a read just to fully understand the different ways that mobile carrier services and enterprise IP telephony have started to interoperate.

There are a number of issues for such interoperability that will come under the big “umbrella” of UC, especially when business and consumer (residence) services converge at the individual user/subscriber level, that I will address in the future. However, I just wanted to highlight a particular point that was addressed in the white paper, “one number accessibility” that is usually associated with "Find Me, Follow Me" services.

It will be very obvious that such a service, regardless of how it is implemented, must be for a particular business responsibility domain. It can’t be used both personal and business contacts, nor should it be used for two different jobs that an employee may have with two different companies. As Finneran points out, business phone numbers, fixed or mobile, have to be controlled by the business. When an employees leaves the company, that number should no longer be controlled by the ex-employee.

Note that I am talking about the telephone number, not the device that uses that number, and this makes the issue of having more than one mobile number associated with a mobile telephone device very important. This is becoming particularly pertinent with the advent of personalized “smartphones” that consumers will now want to use for their work contacts as well. Having a company controlled mobile software client, in addition to whatever a subscriber gets from a consumer mobile service, will enable the end user to have the best of all worlds from UC.

Cell phones have long been able to accommodate two access numbers. Now it is time to bring that power to bear on the benefits of UC for mobile users. “One-number Service” must be defined for either personal contacts or business contacts that share a common mobile end-point device but different management controls and different billing requirements. So, I call that “Two-Number Access,” one for any form of business operations access and the other for any form of consumer service access.

In reading Finneran’s white paper, you will see that there will be FMC options for each, but, more importantly, it will require the carriers to interoperate more with enterprise systems and, for business process applications, to get rid of the “walled gardens.”

Do you agree?

Send your comments and opinions to arosenberg@ucstrategies.com

UC Commentary – January 26, 2008

By Art Rosenberg

Voice is Voice is Voice – But Maybe UC-based QoS Should Be Provided “On Demand?”

There has always been a concern for supporting real-time communication traffic (voice, video) based upon available network resources, because good quality voice connections have almost always been provided with traditional TDM connections. When PSTN demand exceeded capacity, however, the caller would get a rare network “busy” signal, even though the called party’s line was not really busy. Maintaining adequate voice quality for IP telephony and VoIP connections is the subject of a new white paper for managing converged UC networks.

In dealing with different role-based scenarios for business voice connections, the report acknowledges that callers using VoIP contacts or mobile services will not be bothered too much by lower QoS/QoE results. With multimodal devices, they could also have the option to transition to IM text, if necessary.

While it is all well and good to accommodate voice conversations “on demand” by a caller, there are new UC factors that should be considered that will change how voice connections will be made in a UC environment. These include:

· Mobile users will be the biggest users of the flexibility of UC-based voice calls, because they are the ones who will need UC flexibility for changing environments, as well as for real-time interactions for time-sensitive responsiveness.

· UC flexibility will increasingly shift to real-time multimodal messaging contacts rather than immediate voice conversations because information exchange is much richer with a visual interface than the traditional TUI, contact recipients will be less available to talk, and IM facilitates more efficient multi-tasking.

· It makes no difference which party in a phone conversation is the mobile one, as long as one is mobile, Voice QoS will be at risk. As customers get more mobile and start using their iPhones for customer contacts, they too will be introducing QoS problems.

· In addition to what we have already seen with email, UC’s telephony presence and instant text messaging will rapidly displace the ad hoc phone call and the consequential telephone answering voice messages that result when the call recipient is not available. That will reduce telephone call traffic for voice mail and its impact on QoS.

· On the other hand, with UC, any form of messaging can dynamically transition into an instant voice conversation (“click-to-call”), or to an “instant” voice or/video multi-party conference connection. However, just as mobile communications bring an expected loss of QoS, so too will any “instant” voice conference be expected to suffer possible degradation of QoS.

When better quality voice conversations must be guaranteed, it is clear that an appointment must be made, not just for network resources, but also to insure the availability of the people involved. Otherwise, the ad hoc telephony world and the mobile communications world will be converging to create lower quality QoS that will be accepted by most users.

Perhaps QoS shouldn’t be taken for granted any more and we should leave it up to the users to “Click for Better QoS” for on-demand network priority, if that will indeed make a difference. Like everything else involved with UC, we really have to get down to the level of the individual users and their needs.

Do you agree?

Send your comments and opinions to arosenberg@ucstrategies.com

UC Moving to Mashups and "Unified Marketing"

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

March 21, 2008

“Unified UC Marketing” to Sell “UC Mashups?”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

So now that VoiceCon is over and the big announcements have been made, what’s new?

Aside from a number of major announcements by enterprise telephony providers that they were moving forward with UC and “open” software applications, the biggest announcements seemed to come from Microsoft and IBM, separately and together.

Microsoft Moves It’s UC Play Into The Enterprise Call Center

Microsoft announced another telephony-related alliance (and investment), this time with old time call center provider Aspect, to bring UC into the contact center through both availability and multimodal contacts with “experts” to achieve faster and more efficient first contact resolution (FCR). As mentioned in my commentary on Aspect’s call center research, over 10% of all contact center agent connections require contact with someone else to resolve the customer’s needs. That is an inefficiency that damages customer satisfaction, yet, there is no way that every agent can be trained to know everything.

As I originally mentioned in the customer contact book I co-authored with Paul Anderson back in 2000, those “experts” will be busy with their other responsibilities and will not be always available the way a dedicated contact center agent must be. As a consequence, FCR may not be realistic, nor even expected, as long as responsiveness is reasonable for the customer’s needs.

Another practical consideration for the contact center is that with the increase in online self-service applications via multimodal desktop and mobile devices, access to scarce “experts” won’t always go through a first-line agent, but directly to such available experts. Furthermore, with consumer UC services and mobile devices, the response from experts doesn’t have to be through an immediate voice connection or later callback.

IBM Announces BIG Moves

IBM, a direct competitor in the business UC spaces that Microsoft occupies, was not to be outdone, and announced major investment in UC technologies. Like Bill Gates and Jeff Raikes did before them, IBM delivered its “vision” of the UC future in a keynote address at VoiceCon by Mike Rhodin, GM of IBM Lotus software, that stressed mobility, interoperability/open standards, and instant, multimodal, multi-party “meetings.”

Aside from their UC visions that confirmed what most UC observers have talked about in the past, IBM is also “putting its money where its mouth is” by applying its Venture Capital Program to innovative UC developments. That is what I would describe as “UC mashups” between different communication applications, multimodal devices, and business process applications. Needless to say, there will be no limit to the number of such UC mashups that will be created in the coming years.

Microsoft and IBM and “Unified UC Marketing”

The big climax of VoiceCon took place in a confrontational debate between UC vendors about software interoperability and standards for Microsoft’s OCS. As a result, Microsoft and IBM agreed to do interoperability testing of their UC software applications and report their results before the next VoiceCon show in November.

While the two may be competing with their email and IM/presence products, both of them are partnering with the telephony vendors and the business application developers. This leads me to believe that enterprise organizations will not be buying telephone systems separately any more without including UC and business process applications in their plans.

That is why I expect interoperable “mashups” will be sold as either products or services or a combination of both through what I call “unified” UC marketing teams that can represent the whole UC enchilada, not just the old pieces. That approach will be particularly necessary, as software applications move into SOA infrastructures and become available as SaaS services. As business applications get tied into communication applications in a variety of different flavors, the combinations will have to be evaluated as they relate to specific applications and as part of total operational environment. This also has implications for the wireless carriers who will now be forced to jump on the “open” UC bandwagon without the benefit of their traditional “walled gardens.”

Given all this convergence, it will have a significant effect on the sales/support channels, especially the traditional telephone system “value added resellers” (VARs). Not only will they have to be involved with the new UC “mashups,” but also with hosted and managed service options that will be joining or replacing the old CPE game.

The telephony infrastructure world is definitely changing along with the telephones themselves. This, in turn, is going to change traditional enterprise IT responsibilities for business communications as well.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your comments and opinions by sending them to artr@ix.netcom.com

Why UC Is Confusing to the Enterprise - 2

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

March 12, 2008

Why UC Is So Confusing – Because Its Moving Up Different Food Chains At The Same Time!

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As the industry gets ready for the VoiceCon show in Orlando next week, the telecommunications industry has been sharpening its promotional weapons to position themselves for the next phases of UC evolution. The industry has finally stopped touting just “VoIP” cost savings for traditional legacy telephony and moved on to unified, multimodal and mobile business communication applications. That includes an emphasis on real-time messaging, instant voice and video conferencing, and communications enabled business process applications.

But it’s more than that!

Every facet of technology implementation, marketing, enterprise management and administration, and user adoption is being affected by the fundamental shifts that the Internet has enabled. The changes are particularly affecting anything to do with voice telephony; nobody wants just a voice telephone (wired or wireless) anymore, it’s got be a multimodal communication device for both people contacts and information access. As a result, we are seeing all levels of technology and service providers staking their claims in the UC pie and focusing on their contributions to the benefits of UC.

The “UC Change of Life” - Let me count the ways!

In general, everything that we used to do in communicating with people is being upgraded and improved. If you are like me, it’s been real hard to keep up with all the information that pours in over web. So, with UC technology still in a state of evolution, every day brings a torrent of changes to various aspects of how enterprise business communications will be affected. In particular, change is affecting everything and everyone involved with real-time communications, notably telephony and video, but also all forms of messaging.

1. Productivity Results, Not Just Costs – Providers are now selling the productivity benefits of UC to the business processes and groups of end users, rather than just for individual productivity. (I called it “micro-productivity” because the benefits to the enterprise were either small or questionable.) All the vendors are now pushing enterprise and user group performance benefits, not technology benefits, to business management and end users who have to get some direct rewards from adopting UC.

2. Software, Not Hardware – The big telephone system developers are all starting to announce that they are now “software” companies. They are moving to device-independent software offerings for IP-based software servers and device clients.

3. “Open” Software Suites, Not Just Components or Proprietary Suites – In the latest moves, the big telephony guys are out to capture market share by providing all the functional pieces of UC they can. This time, though, it can’t be by proprietary, “closed” suites, because no one wants to be locked in to software, especially with SOA infrastructures staring you in the face, and software applications dynamically evolving forever.

4. “Instant” Multimodal, Multi-party Contacts, Not Restrictive Procedures – “Click-to- Contact” people using multimodal communication endpoints, especially mobile devices, will mean more than voice conversation phone calls in the world of UC. Real-time contacts will include IM and video conferencing, as well as mixed mode, multiparty conferencing, where not everyone is able to participate in the exact same way. Some will be on camera, some will be able to view video, some will be strictly voice, some will watch voice-to-text transcriptions, and, for those unable to participate at all, there will be convenient access to post conference recordings and response options afterwards.

5. Enabling Business Processes To Contact People, Not Just “Person-to-Person” Contacts – As business process applications become capable of automatically monitoring status information in real-time, they will also become able to react to time-critical situations by becoming real-time “contact initiators” to those people who will be affected by the situation. Under the label of Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP), such applications will be able to initiate notifications to selected people (as contact recipients) without having to know exactly what mode of delivery to use.

Unlike a “person-to-person” form of CEBP, where a person can initiate a contextual “click-to-contact” action (call, message) from within any form of information (documents, data files, address books, etc.), applications only have to create a text message “notification,” which can then be delivered in speech, if necessary. Such messages will also contain links for follow on interactions such as a self-service application online or with speech interfaces and must be able to be delivered to any personalized mobile devices that a user may have.

This is perhaps the most promising new area of UC that will bring business process application developers and communication services together into new and “open” partnerships. As described below in point 12, consumers and customer contact applications will be targeted by automated enterprise business process applications that can exploit UC and CEBP, not just internal business users. IBM, Microsoft and vertical market application developers will partner to create applications that will work with old and new business UC providers like Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, Mitel, Interactive Intelligence, Zeacom, etc., and both hosted business and consumer service providers like Verizon and AT&T.

6. Selling UC To Business Management and Individual End Users, Not Just to IT – Because UC is more than traditional telephony; it will affect how business activities are conducted. Therefore, Line of Business management, as well as individual end user groups will be affected. So, its not just about changing out the infrastructure or even about using mobile “smart phones,” its about how all that will change business procedures at an individual user/group and operational level. That will be a prerequisite before IT can configure and implement anything.

7. Planning For UC Outside The Organization, Not Just For Internal Users – Like traditional PSTN telephony, where any phone can call any other phone in the world, UC has to allow the power of multimodal IP communications and “federated” presence to extend to people outside the organization, i.e., business partners and customers. Because one has little control over people outside an organization, UC flexibility will be a critical element for cross-enterprise and cross network contacts. This, of course, brings into play the whole domain of secure access management and regulatory compliance across all forms of communication and information access.

8. Hosted and Managed Services, Not Just Premised-based Technology –Software-based IP telephony, combined with “virtualization” of application software servers, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and SAAS (Software As A Service), is changing the game for how enterprise organizations will implement business process applications and UC. It will shift the responsibilities of the enterprise to managing and using communications technologies, not developing or owning them. This transition will not be overnight, nor will it ever be a 100% change, but the writing is on the wall.

The shift to IP communications as the foundation for UC also means that the traditional communication technology differences between the large, medium and small business organizations will also converge. As users become remote and mobile, they will become like small, but dynamically changing “branch offices.” Hosted services will be applicable to enterprise users in this manner, and, once such services become acceptable to individual business users, the rest of a large organization will be able to benefit in the same way as well. I see the differences between large and small organizations disappearing slowly but surely in the wake of mobile UC.

9. “Unified” Channels Must Sell And Support Both Managed and Hosted UC Services, Not Just Telephony, Premise-based Equipment, or Software – It is very obvious that the many facets of UC capabilities will be selectively implemented for a variety of different individuals and groups in a business organization of any size. Because those needs will be different, it’s not going to be a “one size fits all” sale, nor will it be implementations that are totally independent of other users inside or outside of the organization. Application needs will require design and usage trials before final implementation, and, because of software flexibility, may always be subject to real-world needs for change. “Unified” channels will be key to UC sales and support and they will have to have comprehensive skills to support all phases of business UC migrations, including all forms of communication (messaging, conferencing, application messaging), not just telephony.

10. Enterprise Mobile Device Management Must Be Software Focused, Not Hardware Dependent – It’s just a matter of time, but everyone is starting to agree with me that end users will be responsible for choosing the particular “smart phone” device that they can use for both business and personal applications. What the enterprise will be responsible for is to insure that they can support the software clients for such devices for their business applications only, and let the wireless carriers supply the other consumer-oriented services. It’s not a matter of all or nothing and we are starting to see progress in removing the “walled gardens” of the carriers. (Watch the iPhone change!)

11. Individual End Users Have to View Communication Needs From Both a Contact Initiation and Contact Response Perspective Independently, Not Assuming They Must Always Be Identical – Perhaps the biggest change that will affect end users, the devices they use, and ultimately their technology providers, is that two-way, person-to-person contacts can be accomplished asynchronously, but still be multimodal. (I labeled that kind of thing as “transmodal.”) As described in Point 4 above for multi-party-conferencing that means that both contact recipients and recipients can communicate efficiently and effectively even though each has a different device, a different user interface, different environmental constraints, and different priorities. This is where unified messaging concepts of flexibly using the ease and convenience of voice for messaging input but the efficiency of text for retrieval, as well as the reverse for text information.

This flexibility is in addition to the increased “intelligence” that can be provided to a contact initiator by presence and availability information about potential recipient(s). Each user should be able to initiate contacts in any form that they wish, regardless of whether the recipient is immediately available. The recipients can be notified immediately, but that still doesn’t mean they can respond immediately. In this situation, the initiator can expect something better than the traditional telephone answering game of “telephone tag” and “voice mail jail.”

That is where the concept of “As Soon As Possible” (ASAP) real-time connections can be brought into play as “second prize,” because although people can have all the flexibility in how they communicate, they won’t necessarily have the time to do so synchronously. (“It takes two to tango!”)

Of course, there will always be the need to plan and schedule any synchronous activities, but as business becomes more global, distributed, and “virtual,” such collaborative communication and information exchange activities will become more dependent on remote communication technologies rather than face-to-face meetings.

12. UC Is Also For Consumers, Not Just For Business Users – Although business users will place high priorities for benefits of UC in doing their “jobs,” consumers also use business communications as “customers.” So, in the world of customer contact, consumers will put on their business hats when they either they contact a company for any reason (“doing business”), or the company contacts a customer with a time-sensitive notification of some kind. So, everything we say about end users applies to both business users and consumers, even though the frequency of contact will be very different.

However, this convergence of needs will be reflected in the fact that both consumers and business users will need a consistent and efficient way of communicating with an enterprise and business process applications. The reverse will also be true, i.e., business process applications will want to contact both business users and consumer customers. Again, watch what the iPhone (and it’s competitors) will do the enterprise contact center.

Bottom Line For UC Implementations

Everything that used to be done in the past for business communications will now have to be done better or differently because all the pieces of UC have to be considered and interoperable and because the needs of all the people that will be affected by UC will have to taken into account. That means that proper UC planning and implementation must be more careful and comprehensive than just buying a “plug and play” application, a communication device, or a service. That also means that whom you buy from, rather than who developed the technology, will become very critical to the success of UC implementations.

However, because UC technology is still evolving in tandem with developing new operational requirements for UC within an organization, incremental implementation steps, including using hosted and managed services, will be the practical way to go as long as those steps are “future-proofed” and “open.” That kind of future proofing is what is just starting to happen with some of the new announcements starting to come out for VoiceCon, so stay tuned!

What Do You Think?

Let us know your comments and opinions by sending them to artr@ix.netcom.com

Utility Services: The Funnel For Driving IT Request Fulfillment Efficiencies and Savings To The Bottom Line

by David A. Zimmer, Sr. Consultant, Veris Associates, Inc.

You know the drill. Someone from the business side makes a demand for new technology. Users have needs unmet because their applications stop working. Servers need to be updated, upgraded, maintained and babysat. The critical business application everyone takes for granted decided to take a vacation during the end of quarter sales blitz. And the auditors are breathing down your neck asking you to prove the value of your existence. Meanwhile, your number one lead technician is sunning himself on the beach somewhere without cell phone coverage.

Your Average Day

Just a normal day in the life of the IT manager and CIO. But, we can handle it – we’ve got enough fire-fighting equipment in place and hours in the day to keep everything down to a low roar. Then, the CFO calls your network administrator directly to ask for an upgrade to the fiber switches and more secure firewalls. “Not a problem,” comes the reply. The VP of Sales is pushing for a record-breaking year and needs more terabytes on the sales processing system. He hall-tackles the lead database administrator to discuss the possibility of adding space by the end of the week.

In the day-to-day operations of the IT infrastructure, we must meet the demands of the business as quickly as possible and maintain stability to the environment. While at one point we might have developed some system to handle requests in an orderly manner, the heat of the moment seems to win out and we bypass our own methods because of emergencies. As a result, we settle into a routine of emergencies, headaches and many activities. In fact, dare I say, we feel comfortable in this mode. We equate busy-ness with productivity, esteem and accomplishment.

At the end of the day, we can look back and actually glory in the number of BlackBerry messages we smacked, meetings attended, phone calls fielded, and “things” crossed off the to-do list. As we lay our heads on the pillow at night after the fifteen hour day exhausted, we feel good because of all the forward progress, even if chaotic, we made.

The major problem with this mode of production is many customers don’t get served. Business units needing IT infrastructure updates done sooner decide to go on their own and create it themselves. Of course, once in place, the IT department must maintain it adding to their already overflowing plates. While the business got served through this method, the company suffers through duplication of effort, loss of purchasing power, disparate systems supporting similar functions, non-traceable changes to strategic systems and an unstable environment. In short, a train speeding down the track out of control and no Superman around to keep it from crashing.

Fulfilling the needs of the business is what the IT department does – that is their purpose. Support the business so the business can meet the needs and demands of its customers. If IT systems fail, the business fails its customers. Therefore, IT Request Fulfillments is a vitally important part to the business. Making it efficient and effective benefits all: the IT department, the business and the business customers.

What is Utility Services?

Utility Services takes IT fulfillment request and pushes them through a defined methodology that funnels requests through a “gatekeeper” without introducing a bottleneck to the speed of business. It puts sanity into the chaos, providing economy of scale through purchasing power, efficiencies in operations, and effectiveness in implementation. It preserves the holistic view of the overall system so changes can be tracked, monitored and maintained. Overall, the IT department gains through planned organization of changes, the business benefits through greater functionality and IT responsiveness plus stability of the IT environment and the business’ customers acquire a more secure sense of comfort from their supplier.

Utility Services is an independent workflow management system providing a single interface for IT requests – updates, upgrades, new functionality and the like. It leverages the good industry practices such as ITIL and reuses existing infrastructure for new applications, combines similar requests into a single work stream leveraging purchasing power for greater cost savings. Most importantly, it frees the IT department from the chaotic request processes of today so that they can be more responsive to the business requests, which seems almost counter-intuitive.

I hear you moan, “Oh great, more processes, more paperwork, more red-tape, more structure equals more pain to get anything done.” After years of helping companies develop and institute processes, we have learned at least one thing: Those companies that develop systematized methods, enforce their use and improve them rather than ignore them, progress further, sell more and increase profits and savings than those that do not. Some see increases in ranges of 20%, 50% and greater. Industry studies back up these claims.

Companies have greater insight into current and project capital spending, human resource allocations and requirements and more efficient day-to-day operations and successful projects.

A Governance Model To Meet Customer Needs

Utility Services is a governance model of ensuring all solutions implemented within an IT organization meet the traditional criteria of customer sign-off requirements, solution design and testing, and release into the environment. It establishes and enforces necessary customer communication checkpoints via a series of documentable and repeatable processes and procedures. It ensures IT goals align with business needs and initiatives through a consolidated resource management interface to manage work-loads and enable resource forecasting. And finally, it streamlines standard requests by automating approvals, traceable milestones, requester communication and hand-offs as appropriate.

Why Utility Services?

The big question still remains. Why implement Utility Services? You already seem to be getting the job done. Sure, your people are overworked and under-appreciated, but they still show up for work each day, don’t they? Why rock the boat, change the way of doing things and suffer through the cultural shock of more efficient operations?

For those companies where we helped them implement Utility Services, here is what they report:

• Utility Services enables organizations both small and large to best utilize their money and people.
  
  
• Utility Services reinforces ITIL good practices by building the underlying philosophy into the systems that IT departments live by.
  
  
• Utility Services can be implemented in a relatively short period of time, enabling “quick wins” for management and IT workforce stakeholders.
  
  
• Utility Services continues to evolve with your IT department so it becomes more transparent and easier to adapt to business initiatives.
  
  
• Utility Services takes the mystery out of implementation status.
  
  
• Utility Services helps align the infrastructure with business goals, and escalates issues before they become problems.
  
  
• Utility Services enables purchasing departments to more accurately forecast spending schedules and empowers them to negotiate better pricing and support from vendors, be it hardware or services.
  
  
• Utility Services allows more effective time management and prioritization of your IT department’s time and money.

Conclusion

Fulfilling business requests takes up much of IT’s daily time. Inefficient methodologies erode the very infrastructure and people required to keep the business going. Untraceable changes and updates introduce instability into an already overly complex and vital system to the business. Personal agendas and priorities drive the changes without considering the benefit or detriment to the business. IT staff, desiring to do a good job and meet the needs, work at full speed but seem to fall short at the end of the day.

Utility Services takes the inefficiencies, the uncertainties, the liabilities and the insecurities out of IT Request Fulfillment. By funneling requests through an automated and organized process, duplication of effort is eliminated, overspending on materials is slashed, workloads can be adjusted to align with business needs, personal agendas can be removed and priorities are established to truly meet the business’ highest priorities for the greatest gain.

We have seen companies transformed saving millions of dollar annually on purchases alone. IT efficiency increased dramatically and the stability of the infrastructure reached desired service levels without significantly increasing costs. The implementation and definition of Utility Services takes a chaotic methodology, structures it and drives it for the maximum utility to the business.

You are invited to obtain our free whitepaper, “The Games We Play: Conquering The Challenge of IT Fulfillment” by fellow consultant Cheryl Winters. Simply Click Here to get a copy.

Siemens New UC Server

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

March 3, 2008

UC Migration Strategy Takes More Shape With Siemens Announcement

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

If you have been reading all the blogs and commentaries put out by industry analysts and pundits, you know that everyone has been trying to define what UC really is all about and, more importantly, how to get there from here.

Part of the problem is that some obvious prerequisites for the UC vision have not been met from an open, standards perspective, i.e., “federated presence” across enterprise and service provider networks. The other part of the problem that scares IP management is how to start a UC migration selectively, yet be “future-proofed” for the new capabilities that UC might offer, especially in a mobile, device independent world.

Up to this point, the practical recommendation for UC migration has been to avoid replacing telephony systems that still work for internal users, but start replacing end-of-life voice mail systems to exploit the benefits of unified messaging as a major component of UC. In addition, focus on selectively adding mobile UC capabilities via hosted services for those business users who are key to high-value business processes. Finally, get ready for mobile consumers who will be using personalized “smart phones’ for customer contacts and will need the support of multimodal agents for assistance, as well as multimodal self-service applications (not just IVR) to do business.

The Siemens announcement appears to have put more meat on the bones of enterprise and service provider UC that will enable IT management to start planning customized UC implementation strategies that can be open and “future-proofed.” It focuses on an open, presence-based “UC server” that provides a place to hang all the UC application hats on, rather than just an IP telephony server that would integrate with other UC applications.

What I noticed in particular about the Siemens announcement was that although they do offer IP telephony interoperability as software, they didn’t even mention telephone devices at all. Interesting!

I have a lot of practical questions about this announcement, so stay tuned for more.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your comments and opinions by sending them to artr@ix.netcom.com