The "New Avaya" – Innovating Desktop Telephony For UC

Art Rosenberg
The Unified-View

Avaya’s announcement this week of a new President and CEO, a Cisco and AT&T Bell Labs veteran, Kevin Kennedy, capped the theme of this year’s Avaya Global Analyst conference – refocusing business telephony applications under the umbrella of unified communications (UC)!

The analyst meeting was noteworthy, not just because the company has been privatized for about a year now and has been reorganizing itself product-wise and internally, but, as a leading provider of traditional enterprise telephony systems, Avaya is also in the process of reshaping itself as a key “UC ” technology provider. This means moving its traditional desktop voice telephony products and services into the emerging multimodal world of enterprise UC to support both Gen Y/Millennial employees and customers.

There were a number of newly hired executives in attendance, some so new that they didn’t even have their Avaya business cards yet, but are recognized industry experts who can help reshape the “New Avaya.”

Keeping Desktop Telephony Links With UC

While Avaya has joined the rest of the telecommunications industry in moving towards new and open software-based SIP telephony and multimodal UC, they have also updated their vested interest in premise-based desktop voice communications equipment with “touch-screen” IP phones that provide a richer user interface for applications and interoperate with desktop PC “softphones” and a variety of personalized end user mobile devices. They also have packaged up a convenient hardware/software UC solution for the large, untapped SMB market, to replace simplistic legacy key systems.

The “New Avaya” is still transitioning from traditional desktop person-to-person telephony by consolidating it’s product focus on “business user“ functions, i.e., “UC” (unified communications for internal users) and “CC” (contact center functions for customers) and restructuring its organization and market approaches accordingly as described by UC Strategies analyst, Blair Pleasant and a slew of other industry pundits. But Avaya is also moving beyond voice conversations into the realm of transmodal integration with business process applications.

Avaya To Provide Communications-oriented Business Software Solutions

Rather than offer just voice-based “horizontal” communication functions, Avaya is moving up the UC technology food chain to address the communication needs of “vertical” market business processes. That requires integrating their real-time voice communications capabilities with both online business applications and text-based person-to-person communications. While this means integrating IP telephony with the email, IM, and business application software domains of Microsoft and IBM and consumer services, it also means protecting its large legacy TDM telephony customer base, which will slowly but surely be forced to migrate to IP Telephony, UM, and UC.

That concern may be what has prompted Avaya to place its UC focus on business end user needs for communications, particularly where real-time, person-to-person contacts are involved. Now that UC has opened the door for such contacts to be more “contextual,” personalized, and integrated within online business applications, Avaya is moving its telephony and messaging offerings to fit the particular needs of different kinds of users in different vertical markets. With new desktop and mobile devices becoming more flexible, screen-based and speech enabled, the path to customized multimedia user interfaces for UC is now open.

While there are lots of online software application offerings in the vertical markets today, Avaya believes its long-time expertise with real-time voice communications, a key component of UC, will give it a competitive advantage as a strategic partner for enterprise UC migrations. Avaya’s traditional telephony product reliability may also help preserve its future software role in UC against the likes of Microsoft, which is already aiming to displace enterprise hardware PBX functions with its new OCS R2 software server.

A Few Things I Didn’t Hear Enough About

The Avaya Global Analyst meeting was crammed full of information as their new executive team tried to lay out all the changes that would be taking place in their product lines. Jorge Blanco, Vice president, Product Management, Unified Communications, almost lost his voice in racing through a long overview of Avaya’s new hardware and software product roadmaps, all converging on UC and CC needs of different sized organizations.

CEBP - While Avaya’s earlier move into “communications enabled business processes” (CEBP) was never viewed as a “UC application,” it’s role in initiating contacts with people was definitely viewed as a driver for UC, particularly for mobile users. However, there was little mention of CEBP at the Avaya meeting, either in the context of UC, nor as an important element of “CC,” where I see it playing a strong role in “proactive” customer care applications for mobile users. Maybe when the reorganization settles down, and the new managers that Avaya has brought on board have had a chance to develop their plans, we will see some missing pieces in marketing strategies.

Hosted Services – While Avaya did talk about their new emphasis on “Operations Services,” (formerly called “Managed Services”) and “Co-Delivery” of customized solutions for vertical markets, their presentations emphasized premise-based hardware and software for business organizations. However, given the growing shift in business applications to SaaS, on-demand “cloud-based computing,” and most recently, Microsoft’s announcement of their Windows Azure, etc., I heard very little about Avaya’s plans to exploit their new business UC applications as hosted services, particularly for the SMB market. This could be done directly, through application partners, through service providers or sales channels, as some competitors have been announcing.

However, Avaya did indicate that it would be offering voice–to-text messaging services to enterprise customers as a proprietary service provided by SpinVox. Furthermore, Avaya’s new president and CEO, Kevin Kennedy, comes on board from his role at Cisco as Senior Vice President of the Service Provider Line of Business and Software Technologies Division. That certainly could be helpful to the “New Avaya!”

What Do You Think?

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

UM Will Be Biggest Piece of UC

October 12, 2008

UM Getting More Complex But Key Gateway To UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The term “unified messaging” (UM) first showed up in the early days of electronic messaging, when email and voicemail were the only kids on the block. All that UM tried to do then was to have a voicemail system emulate an email user to check for new email messages and then report that those email messages were waiting to be picked up, i.e., simple email message waiting notification. The definition of UM has changed considerably since those early days, as has the world of messaging in general.

As information becomes readily and instantly accessible on the Web and people become more mobile for both information and communication access, real-time person-to-person contacts will really become more difficult because people will become overloaded time-wise. The highly touted “presence” capabilities of UC won’t make busy people more “available,” it will just give them more intelligence for managing their real-time priorities. As a result, asynchronous multimedia messaging will become more prevalent for business communications and UM will become the biggest, practical cornerstone for UC flexibility, especially for mobile “smart-phones.”

Voicemail Has Always Been Confusing

Ever since its birth in the ‘70’s, “voicemail” was torn between doing mailbox-to-mailbox voice message exchange and the “telephone answering” function of caller voice messaging. Since email quickly outpaced voicemail for the former, voicemail quickly became even more focused on incoming call management and caller messaging. (Enterprise voicemail statistics even way back then showed 70% of the voicemail messages were caller-generated)
Voicemail systems had even moved into the realm of sending fax messages to be sent to stored and forwarded to printers and telephone-based caller self-services through IVR technology, but, today, online information portals and increasing adoption of personalized 3G multimodal mobile “smartphones” are starting to displace legacy Telephone User Interfaces (TUIs) for such interactive applications.

UC Power to Asynchronous Messaging

Caller messaging will be affected by several aspects of UC, including telephony presence, which will let callers know if and when the callee will be available for a voice conversation. However, presence has not been of much value for asynchronous messaging, because there is no “real-time” availability required. When it comes to asynchronous caller messaging, there are still practical problems of person-to-person message delivery that need attention. These include:

· Enabling the caller to control message delivery parameters such as “deadlines,” after which there a message that is not picked up should be handled in alternative ways, e.g., returned to sender, sent elsewhere, etc.

· Enable message “importance” to be changed dynamically (increased or decreased) by the sender after it has been sent, but not picked up by the recipient.

· Provide the caller with the option for using voice input for message content creation, but sending in text format. (Current new voice-to-text messaging services are a recipient-controlled option, not caller-controlled.)

· Enable the caller to be aware of message notification capabilities that the recipient has enabled, so that they can be comfortable with sending a message that may have time sensitivity. This may allow the sender to choose the most appropriate form of notification, including “none.”

· Enable the voice message recipient to avoid having to manually back up or skip voice message playbacks or having to transcribe important information in a voice message to text notes. The latter is also important since voicemail systems don’t let you store voice messages for very long and the information cannot not easily be passed on to others in voice form. (New speech recognition technology now allows voice-to-text messaging delivery as service offerings, but they haven’t yet been fully integrated under UC.)

Sender Message Delivery Management and UM/UC

With so much information accessible on the Web, along with “always on” mobile accessibility, people will become less and less available in real-time for person-to-person contacts. That leaves asynchronous messaging as second prize for people who want to initiate those person-to-person contacts. What presence will increasingly do is let people know that people are just not available at the moment for an ad hoc voice conversation.

We don’t need presence to let us send a message, but as described earlier, it would be useful for senders to have more control over the messages they do send, in terms of mode of notification and delivery.

There is also the old issue of who owns that message. Ever since the early days of postal services, English Common Law had the “Mailbox Rule,” which gave ownership of a letter placed in a public mailbox to the addressee, not the sender. Email and Voicemail systems generally still use that rule for sender messages, but with the power of “virtual” IP communications that are not location-based, it may be time to change that rule.

The bottom line is that unified messaging will play an increasingly important role in UC for business communications, especially when messages become contextual UC gateways to voice conversations, conferencing, and self-service business process applications.

New Report On UM Solutions

So what is actually happening in the world of UM technology products?

My colleague at UC Strategies.com and COMMfusion, Blair Pleasant, just updated her market report on Unified Messaging (UM) solutions for 2008. She did a great job of rounding up the technology offerings that have been labeled as unified messaging (UM), but, just like what has happened with “UC,” “UM” has gotten more complicated.

Not only are the offerings different from each other in various ways, but Blair even had to come up with new subcategories of UM (e.g., “Enhanced UM”) to encompass the new “voicemail” functionalities that are part of both the voice messaging and call management playbooks.

Included in the extended user capabilities of “Enhanced UM” are things like:

· Cross-modal conversion from voice to text message content
· Visual, screen-based user interfaces for voice message retrieval (“Visual Voicemail”), caller information and call management (call screening)
· Speech-enabled user interfaces instead of traditional Touchtone TUIs for input
· “Find me, Follow me” personalized call routing to several phone numbers
· Call return to reply to a caller voice message with a contextual call initiation (like “click-to-dial”)

It seems that this new UM report leaves real-time (synchronous) message exchange, e.g. presence-based IM, in the UC, not the UM domain. However, immediate notification and delivery of messages is a real-time aspect of UM.

UM flexibility would support what is now being labeled as “communications enabled business processes” or CEBP, where either calls or messages can be contextually initiated to a specific person on behalf of another user (“person-to-person”) or for an automated “self-service” application process (“process-to-person”). We do have to start thinking about business process applications as if they are unique individuals that we communicate two-way with too!

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or .

"Virtualizing" Applications for UC Security

October 10, 2008

Comments on Common User Devices For Both Business and Personal Use

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As you probably know from reading my articles since the year 2000, I have been a big proponent of a single handheld mobile device (with multiple access addresses) that will allow an individual user to manage all their communications for both business and personal needs. We are slowly getting closer to that capability, but there are some enterprise security roadblocks still in the way.

I have suggested that enterprise IT management should concentrate on protecting access to information on a “virtual network” basis, not on a premise-basis like the old days of filing cabinets in office buildings. My view is having the individual business process applications, which are the access gateways to databases, be the security guardians to information entry and retrieval. That means that the transport networks and even the computer platforms should NOT be the real protectors of different kinds of information for different kinds of people.

I most recently wrote about Citrix practicing what it preaches about securely virtualizing enterprise information with its new policy of “Bring Your Own Computer” (BYOC) for its employees. By “virtualizing” their business applications, they now feel comfortable in letting their employees use any laptop of their choice BOTH business and personal applications. The concept is obviously applicable to more personalized, handheld mobile devices and “smart phones’ that will be popping out of the consumer woodwork in record numbers in the course of the coming year.

Some Comments

I enjoyed reading your blog. A couple of thoughts:

1) Multi-device communication is another key enabler to the cell phone becoming all things. Today, we use bluetooth headsets. Tomorrow, bluetooth speaker phones, using our TV sets for the display, a wireless pen as the keyboard-interface... So in the future, we walk into our office (at home, at work, at a 3rd party) and a key board, screen, and speaker phone are waiting for us and we no longer need to fuss with laptops. This plays into the cloud computing future too. Quick, I need to sell my Dell stock.....

2) Customers want to communicate with a company, the way they communicate with each other. This means that companies should be quick adopters in the multi-channel world, but should not try and drive user adoption faster than critical mass within the market. More and more company networks will look like carrier networks and they will need to peer with the cell phone providers in order to take care of full 4G/IMS/SIP/WS capability. ISDN will not cut it any more.

3) Training and rewarding customers on which channel to use when, will also become important. Most companies offer self-service on the web as their cheapest service offering. Calling by phone, email, chat, letters, fax, texting, .... are usually a lot more expensive channel to service a customer. By rewarding customers who first try the web and then still need to call, chat, email, ... by putting them in front of the queue and bypassing an IVR or another screening mechanism, then both the company and customers win. Same with teaching customers to use your web site if you think they will be frequent users. This will have to be balanced with effectiveness per channel, not just efficiency.

4) Presence, Location, and Identity will add to the context of the communication. Presence is your state of communication ability (device, channel, availability). Location can be proximity based, exact lat/long, or association based. Identity is the cell phone (something you have) along with a password (something you know) and is the basis for all security.

5) No data at rest in the field. This core security principle means that we should not have our source of truth data with in the PDA. To overcome lack of universal connectivity, data can be cached on the PDA (songs, movies, contact list, important files, ...). So the library of songs, movies, information, should reside within the cloud.

6) Fixed Mobile Convergence breaks an enterprises security model. Most companies will continue to treat mobile devices as an external device, even if you are within the company building. For an enterprise to enforce security, they need to control and log everything. One thing the Blackberry server does is enable this on the data/email side. God forbid if someone watches porn on their cell phone while at work....

At some point, the big software companies are going to get real serious about communication, vs. the dabbling that they are doing now. Hey, Nortel is now worth <1B.

Sorell Slaymaker

P.S.

My fear is that the U.S. will continue to lag in innovation/capability.

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I felt compelled to respond to your posting on Unified-view - smartphones. Good to speak to you again (I was the Mitel guy on your UC panel at ITExpo and we spoke).

This is a very interesting technical evolution to watch. As an enterprise communications vendor, we definitely have a vested interest in this, and enabling integration of mobile devices to enterprise applications, including communications is very valid. Mobile device vendors are certainly supportive and support APIs and are active in partnerships with vendors such as ourselves to do just that.

The big key as you point out is how does the distribution of these devices and various software, clients get managed and controlled. It appears to me the device vendors are taking more control of this and in effect bypassing the service provider in setting the strategy for a wider usage (e.g. drive more demand) of these mobile devices, for both consumer and business users. As the public airwaves are needed for connectivity, the carriers will wake up and meter this in some fashion I am sure. Personally on the debate of "terminal vs "computer" for mobile handhelds, I think both will exist so it's kind of a moot debate, as the user/business will decide depending on personal use and application.

Regards,
Kevin Johnson
Mitel

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While this "BYOC" concept isn't common, we are definitely seeing a desire to go to a browser-based softphone such as the one we deliver in our one-X Portal product. There are some non-trivial security infrastructure integration considerations but there are definitely ways to make such a concept work.

Andy Zmolek,

Avaya

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Stay tuned for “virtualization” and it’s impact on UC!

What Do You Think?

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

"Smartphones" For Mobile Enterprise and Consumer UC

October 5, 2008

The Smartphones Are Coming for both Business and Consumer Mobile UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The expected mobile rat race is taking off, as witness the roundup of handheld device product announcements in Michael Finneran’s article on the UC Strategies website. As he correctly points out, the target of these device offerings that are still tightly coupled to wireless carrier services, are subscribers who are consumers most interested in personal contacts and entertainment. Little if any concessions are being made to subscribers who will be using those same devices for business applications or to the enterprise organizations that must securely control access to those business applications and the information content they use.

In another excellent article in InformationWeek, “Is the Smartphone Your Next Computer,” Alexander Wolfe writes about the mobile “smartphone” becoming the new personalized laptop for mobile access to enterprise applications. I might rephrase that title to something like “Is The Mobile Handheld Computer Going To Become Your Next ‘Smartphone?’”

From a UC perspective, you are damn right it will!

Overcoming Enterprise Concerns About Information Security

As Wolfe reports in his article, while end users may want to have a single, multimodal device for both their business and personal communication activities, enterprise IT management is resistant to loss of control and security, and might only support locked-down devices for business applications.

As I pointed out in my last post about Citrix and it’s new policy of “BYOC” (Bring Your Own Computer) for its employees, the big hang up for enterprise mobility has been security and device support. Handheld communication mobility, however, is where the flexibility of UC really pays off the most, much more so than at the desktop. So, as I see it, the security concerns for mobile devices can be relieved by “virtualizing” enterprise applications, just like they are starting to do for desktop PC use.

“Virtualized” application servers can control secure access to sensitive information in a network service environment, while allowing the enterprise to still manage application usage and access. That is where the new Web network infrastructures of SOA and SaaS are taking business process applications, but we really do need to include mobile device independence and UC flexibility into that mix as well.

Michael Finneran raises the issue of whether mobile devices should store business applications and data like a desktop computer, or just be an access “terminal.” In a recent email, he wrote:

”With regard to design, the big issue is should the mobile device be a computer (with on-board storage) or a “terminal” (where all of the data is stored centrally)? The problem with the “Terminal” model is that wireless networks are inherently unreliable, and will be completely unavailable if you’re on an airplane- no network means no work gets done. That model is more secure, but only if we have a hard and fast authentication system.”

My opinion? The handheld or portable laptop device should always function at least as a mobile “terminal.” If you really need to have reliable access, find a wired connection! Otherwise, use any available wireless access. More and more wireless access is becoming available, especially on planes where there is a lot of “dead time.” In the worst case where you have to “work” without a network connection and therefore need to store information in a mobile device, you will then probably want a very secure laptop.

Of course, we still need the wireless carriers to be more supportive of those consumers who are also business users that need device-independent mobile access to and from a variety of enterprise applications. This would include exploiting enterprise Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) and self-service application portals. That same need will apply to any consumer who is a “customer” of a variety of application service providers. But, that’s another debate that isn’t finished.

The big issue that is really shaping up is who will supply those “smartphone” devices, mobile operating systems, and mobile software clients to subscribers of wireless services, and how will enterprise organizations be able to exploit and control those devices in terms of access to proprietary business information by authorized business users. The battle for control is just starting!

What Do You Think?

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

Citrix "BYOC" Policy Will Drive UC Too

September 26, 2008

Power to The End Users - Citrix “BYOC” Will Help Enterprise UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

There have been many past rumbles in the IT press that enterprise organizations were increasingly subsidizing the laptops that their employees selected on their own for business use. The last guesstimate reported was roughly 10% of the workforce, typically those who needed mobility and information portability. There was little correlation of this trend with communications, particularly with new UC capabilities.

The business user adoption of PDAs and cell phones, and now multi-modal “smart phones,” focused the UC spotlight on the importance of personalized endpoint communication devices that will be used for both business and consumer contacts and information. Now, that concept is “coming out of the closet” with Citrix’s public announcement that it is compensating it’s employees to procure their own laptops of choice, dubbed as “Bring Your Own Computer” (BYOC).

The BYOC plan requires that employees use Citrix’s “virtualized” software that keeps all business applications and data on the company servers, while personal software can be installed and used on the laptops. This arrangement extends the role of the portable desktop PC in the same direction as that of mobile handheld devices, which will reinforce the UC focus on selective end user control of their accessibility and availability for both business and personal activities on a single device.

What Does That Mean For Enterprise UC?

We have long suggested that UC flexibility is not just about business end users, but will be used by mobile consumers, especially when doing business on the Web. I labeled that kind of activity “Consumer UC,” where consumers need to contact other consumers or service providers and vice versa. Where the user is a “customer,” there is a sensitive relationship that will require special enterprise capabilities traditionally found in telephone call centers, but should now be labeled as “Customer UC” to differentiate it from internal enterprise contacts.

As the telephony industry transitions from wired, location-based voice to becoming part of the multi-modal, mobile UC world of communications, information access has to be integrated as part of person-to-person and process to-person business contacts. With IP telephony and “rich presence” supporting UC, legacy voice conversation silos can give way to more “collaborative” interactions between people who are not necessarily face-to-face. This capability drives another productivity nail into the coffin of “human contact latency” that has always hampered both individual and organizational business process performance.

Separation of Church (Business) and State (End Users)

While handheld mobile device choices by individual end users have been reluctantly accepted by some business organizations, portable desktop devices that stored proprietary information and applications, were still controlled and supported by internal IT departments. That usually meant that those laptops would not be freely used for personal applications and public web services.

With enterprise software and information safely ensconced in secure, enterprise- controlled “virtual” storage, such as offered by Citrix to its customers, laptops can now be selected by individual end users to meet their personal interests and still be used for business work. That resonates well with the UC pitch for meshing personal communications via public consumer communication services with business contacts (through the “office”) using a single multimodal device.

Virtualization of desktop business applications and information completes the picture for end user control of their UC accessibility and availability through the device of their choice at any time (handheld or laptop). This virtualization approach enables the enterprise to maintain access and usage control to protect business information and business process applications.

We therefore applaud Citrix for publicly practicing what we have been preaching that will drive greater use of enterprise UC - device independence from business applications. Now we just need more network-independence for those devices!

What Do You Think?

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

Focusing On "Enterprise UC"

September 21, 2008

Bringing “Enterprise UC" Into Focus

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

With the rapid uptake of mobile, personalized “smartphones” displacing usage of legacy desktop voice-only telephones and PCs for both information and people access, I think it is time to acknowledge that new unified communication (UC) applications are going to be used by both consumers for personal communication and information services as well as by business users in any size organization.

This means that UC capabilities must support both traditional direct “person-to-person” contacts, as well as new, more automated, multi-modal “person-to-process-to-person” routing of real-time connections and asynchronous messages. In addition, business process applications must also be able to proactively initiate contacts with individuals as automated “process-to-person” notification services.

Enterprise UC really has three different perspectives that must be considered for implementation planning of these UC capabilities. These are:

Business process improvements

Individual end user requirements and benefits

Technology implementation alternatives and priorities

The question that seems to confuse the market in these days of drastically changing technologies is which perspective is most important and in what order should they be addressed?

UC Experts Say Start With “Top-down” UC Operational Planning

Telecommunications industry veterans Marty Parker and his partner, Don Van Doren, have put together an excellent online presentation that objectively focuses on the “whys” and “how to’s” of UC implementation planning. Rather than start with UC infrastructure needs or even integration of new UC applications, Marty suggests beginning with finding important, high-value business processes that need more efficient and effective methods of communicating and accessing information by people. This “top-down” approach particularly targets business processes that strategically help generate revenue and operational costs, such as those that involve customer-facing personnel, rather than looking to simply reduce communication costs.

Their basic approach to UC implementation planning is to identify operational business problems that are caused by communication delays with people, sometimes referred to as “human (contact) latency.” Referring to such operational bottlenecks as communication “hotspots,” Parker provides case studies that show that the greater flexibility and efficiencies of new UC communications technology can change and streamline business processes. This can help generate greater productivity from an organization as a whole (as opposed to individual user productivity) or what UC Strategies.com calls “UC-Business” productivity.

Actually, if you think about it, the benefit of UC is not really limited just to a single organization, but to all partner organizations and any customers involved in a common business process. So, UC should be viewed as new communication technology that improves upon existing capabilities that all involved organizations and individuals will want to exploit and utilize. Once such operational needs, benefits, and changes are identified and prioritized, only then can application and infrastructure requirements and implementation alternatives be meaningfully evaluated and pursued by IT management.

UC at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A.

The show had a reasonable turnout, considering that there were other events in the country competing for the enterprise IT audience. While many of the sessions were focused primarily on voice telephony from an enterprise infrastructure or hosted service provider perspective, about 15% of the sessions were concerned with UC application technologies. What was unfortunate to see is that almost every speaker still had to give their own definition of “UC” before launching into their presentations. Such definitions were generally about the “why” (improving personal user productivity and reducing costs) and more pointedly about the “how” through IP telephony infrastructure and voice applications.

However, 25% of those UC sessions focused on UC and contact center applications, one of which was a panel discussion that I moderated. This is where UC ROI is tied to more than just cost savings because it can increase revenue generation and customer retention. Since customer contacts are increasingly originating from desktop PCs and mobile “smart-phones” (through web-based online information and self-service portals), email, SMS, and IM contact applications are also starting to drive customer-initiated inbound voice connections through “click-to-talk” UC capabilities. UC technology not only exploits “presence” availability of customer-facing support staff (“agents” and “experts”), but can also extend to proactive outbound contacts to “available” customers from both customer-facing personnel and automated application notification services.

Observations by “Customer UC” Panel

The customer contact perspective of UC, which I describe as “Customer UC,” looks at information access and live assistance contacts from a “customer perspective. It must be treated differently because customers will control the choice of UC communications that they will use for both initiating and receiving business contacts.

Panelists discussing some “hard questions” in my session, represented Interactive Intelligence, which has come up with a flexible, software-based, “all-in-one” platform for all enterprise voice and telephony UC applications that federates with desktop IM capabilities, Aspect, which is moving all their operational contact center applications to a common SIP-based platform, and NET, which is primarily focused on a common IP network infrastructure to support “Customer UC.”

Some quick answers to questions discussed:

Difference in need between large and small organizations for Customer UC implementations? – No, not from the customer perspective. We are seeing more interest in hosted models for small organizations. They oftentimes don’t have the IT organization to manage the products and turn to a SaaS provider.

Who should be in charge of Customer UC planning? - Combination of LOB management, operational call center management, and IT management.

What should the first step in Customer UC planning be? – Incorporate into overall UC implementation planning strategy to prepare for new customer demands (online, mobile).

Key considerations for presence? – Availability of “Agents,” experts, partner personnel, and customers (for outbound contacts). Clearly, presence is critical for contact center agents. Detailed-level presence won’t be replaced by “available” “not-available” states. Also a rich client, not a consumer-grade client will continue to be critical for the contact center.

Impact of UC on self-service applications? – Multimodal user interfaces for mobile “smart-phones,” desktop softphones, permission-based outbound (proactive) live and automated application contacts with customers (“CEBP”)

Agent handling of “multimodal” customers? – May be difficult to train agents to switch modalities of interaction with customers (Voice conversations, IM, email, SMS, shared information, etc.). Also more complex to manage agent multimodal performance. Consider separating agents into groups by mode of interaction, although they can be rotated across such groups.

Biggest barriers to Customer UC implementation? – Defining multimodal customer access, what that really means for all constituencies, cultural changes within an organization, infrastructure changes to support migration to UC capabilities, costs.

Top mistakes to avoid? –

- Not getting business management involved in UC implementation planning to prioritize operational problems and UC benefits

- Not soliciting key end users in high-value business processes about their communication activities and work environments that will benefit from specific UC applications. Don’t assume that end users will ever know what “UC” really means!

- Planning only for voice-based communication applications

- Looking only at premise-based hardware solutions

- Ignoring the increasing role of personalized (handheld), mobile communication devices and services to help minimize “human contact latency”

- Using communication application software platforms that are not “open”

- Ignoring the role that automated business applications will play in initiating time-sensitive contacts with individual end users

- Ignoring the need to facilitate acceptance and adoption of new UC communication capabilities by end users

Is “UC” the right place to focus? – Not really, if that focus is exclusively on the “platform.” Instead look at what business problems you are trying to solve and what communication applications end users will actually need and use to minimize or avoid those problems. Find an “open” UC platform that will also efficiently deliver both new UC solutions and interoperability with existing communication applications to cover different end user needs. This will be particularly important for the SMB market, which will exploit hosted or managed services, rather than premise-based technologies.

Why is UC so hot right now? – Microsoft gets a lot of credit for getting companies to look at it from the desktop, but Apple’s iPhone and other mobile smartphone devices are starting to drive interest in the mobile consumer services markets. Overall, however it still comes down to specific business problems, specific people, and specific solutions.

What Do You Think?

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

UC Value Not Usually Just Customer-facing

Here's a constructive comment about the value of UC for "Customer UC" Well taken!

Hi, Art,

Thanks for the newsletter. There are certainly some important points about that portion of Unified Communications that are customer-facing. I hope this theme works well for you at the TMC conference.

However, I really don’t agree with your statement, “But, guess where that kind of "productivity benefit usually takes place? In customer-facing activities, better known as customer interactions, …”

Value chain analyses of any company in any specific industry shows that the spending needed to support the delivery of goods and services is distributed in many, many places that are not “customer-facing”. An exhaustive set of examples would fill a very valuable book, but here are a few:

Most high tech (including equipment, software, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, etc., etc.) manufacturing firms spend between 10% and 25% of revenues on their product development cycles; sure these include customer focus groups and validation processes, but they are not “customer facing”.

Cost of goods in manufacturing ranges from 15% to 70% and those costs are not at all customer facing, since they represent the internal or out-sourced production processes.

Hospitals (and railroads, for that matter) are profitable or not based on how smoothly they move the patients (or trains) through the system, i.e. by managing to spend the least amount of money from the fixed payment (health care reimbursement or transportation tariff) they will receive for the work. Even though a patient is perhaps the “customer” the actual costs have little to do with “customer facing” activities.

Almost all of the Enterprise overheads – HR, Finance, IT, etc. – are not specifically customer facings and usual consume 10% to 15% of revenues.

So, my conclusion is that the majority of the business processes in which UC can profitably intervene are not customer-facing.

Improving the customer interface with UC is great – go for it – but not the entire story.

Do you agree?

All the best,

Marty Parker

Principal

UniComm Consulting

408-420-5539 phone

916-652-6573 fax

mparker@unicommconsulting.com

Getting Payoff From "Customer UC"

August 30, 2008

Where’s The UC Beef? – “Customer UC”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Although everyone is talking about moving traditional business telephony to “unified communications,” there are many fundamental questions that have to be answered about implementation. Usually the first questions have been ”What is it?” and “Why should an enterprise do it?”

The justification for the payoff from UC started with reducing costs, but that didn’t get end users and even business management too excited about introducing a lot of change and spending a lot of money. So, the market moved on to the next perspective of benefits from increasing individual “productivity” (“UC-U”), but even there, individual personal time-saving productivity of say, an hour a day, wasn’t too compelling, because who said the enterprise would actually gain from that benefit?

Next, the experts at UC Strategies came up with business process performance benefits, where “streamlining” business processes by reducing the delays of “human contact latency” would either generate revenues faster or minimize potential penalties or revenue losses by getting things fixed more quickly. And they called that kind of productivity “UC-B.”

But, guess where that kind of “productivity" benefit often takes place?

In customer-facing activities, better known as customer interactions, much of which will still take place through telephone call centers, now being called customer contact centers. This name change comes because of the increased use by customers of other forms of online information access and customer assistance, e.g., text messaging, chat. That is why I prefer to label such use of UC flexibility, including mobile contacts, presence management (availability), and CEBP for business process applications contacting people (both customers and customer-facing support personnel), as “Customer UC.”

So, if an enterprise is looking for the “beef of UC,” they will find an important part of it related to business processes that support customer interactions, inbound or outbound, and not just communications between people within their own organization.

Planning for “Customer UC” Implementation – Hard Questions!

However, involving customers over whom the enterprise has little control doesn’t make the task of migrating to “Customer UC” any easier. If anything, the fact that customers will demand that all forms of contact be available to them for business interactions, will be a driving function for having customer-facing staff and online self-service applications be able to communicate through all of the facilities of external UC services.

The challenge of migrating the traditional call center technologies and customer facing personnel to UC will be discussed objectively at the upcoming TMC IT WEST conference in Los Angeles. I will be moderating a panel discussion by some major players in next generation contact center technology that will address the following UC issues:

· How will the size of an organization affect Customer UC implementations?

· Who should be in charge of Customer UC migration planning?

· What should be the first step in Customer UC migration planning?

· What external expertise does Customer UC implementation planning need? Why?

· What call center processes will be impacted most by UC? Which won’t?

· What are key considerations for presence in a UC environment?

· Which customer contact end users should get “UC” capabilities first? Why?

· How will Customer self-service applications be affected by UC?

· How will outbound customer contacts be affected by consumer mobility?

· How will business process applications be affected by “CEBP?”

· How should new Customer UC capabilities be “piloted?”

· How should “agents” be trained to handle “multimodal” customers?

· How should “multimodal agents” be managed and evaluated?

· What Customer UC benefits are most important? How will they be measured?

· Top mistakes to avoid in planning to migrate to Customer UC?

The panelists have been alerted and are prepared to do battle about the best answers to these questions. So stay tuned because I will be writing about those answers after it is over.

What Do You Think?

If you want to add your own question for the panel, just send them to me ASAP. You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

"Can We Talk?" - The Future of UC and Business Telephony

August 10, 2008

“Can We Talk?”

- The Future of Business Telephony With UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

A few weeks ago I received a phone call out of the blue from Heidi Thornlow, the Human Resources Director of Didlake, a “social enterprise dedicated to enrich the lives of adults with disabilities.” She was concerned about the trends in business communications where it is becoming harder to have effective voice conversations with people and wanted to know how UC technology can help the problem. In particular, she felt that the younger generation of workers was becoming addicted to text messaging contacts that prevented more effective verbal interaction.

The HR View

Here is her description of two types of problems she has encountered, where the lack of voice conversation has had a negative impact on business operations:

“Employee A is a high school graduate and 22 years old. She was hired into the function of automated ADP Payroll processing. She is bright, but her preferred mode of communication for problem solving and conflict resolution is texting messages. She also uses texting during business hours to conduct personal business. Her co-workers have routinely complained to human resources that she is not a "team player" and her supervisor has coached her on the importance of improving customer service relationships with her co-workers. The employee has reported responsibility for training others in her job function, but clearly prefers to communicate electronically using a variety of different modalities.”

“Employee B is 50 years old and works in the human resources area. She prefers to use the telephone and face-to-face communication to resolve areas of conflict between employees. She has discerned within her line of business that email is necessary but is not always the best venue for communication between employees, particularly as it relates to solving problems. In fact, in a group meeting that occurred very recently, misunderstandings ensued between co-workers in the course of elaborate emails that were being communicated to a band of approximately 10 different employees. A meeting had to be called to gather all employees' in the same room to tease out the miscommunication and the issues, face to face.”

The IT View

Didlake’s IT Director, Ivy Tetreault, was also invited to comment on this situation:

“I think that Human Resources and policy making needs to come in to play here so that proper office etiquette is
defined and enforced. The problem with Employee A was that she did not understand the issue; she truly believed
that her methods were fine and it was very difficult to enlighten her.  With no policy or official statement from Didlake
it was hard to not look like it was my personal preference (as IT Director) that she answer her phone”

“IT comes into play with researching and implementing the most cost-effective technological options, but I think
IT also has a stake in how employees use/misuse their computers with other types of communication, particularly
personal, and those policies are generally written and approved, but not really enforced.  It is also my understanding
that some companies are OK with texting and all day use of communication websites such as Myspace, which makes
it more difficult for other companies to oppose such practices.”

Looking Ahead

It is clear that there are times when voice and video conversations (TelePresence) become important in business activities, but with more people texting each other and exchanging emails as consumers, there needs to be a better way to selectively and seamlessly exploit both asynchronous and synchronous forms of business contact between people who can’t meet face-to-face.

Need For Both UC Technology and New “Etiquette”

It should be no surprise that person-to-person business contacts, which are more about exchanging information than socializing, are likely to minimize the use of phone calls that increasingly end up in “voice mail jail.” Telephone answering voice mail was a primitive method for converting a failed real-time call attempt into a useful, but asynchronous, voice message. However, with telephony presence (“busy”) information, multimodal mobile “smart-phones,” IM, and “click-to-call” contact initiation, more efficient real-time contacts are becoming available for both callers and callees.

UC technologies are aimed at providing seamless flexibility in changing from one communication modality to another, through what I have called “transmodal communication.” It is not enough to simply have various different, device-dependent modes of communication available to a user, but they must also be able to dynamically switch from one mode to another, as the situation requires. This would allow users to exploit all forms of messaging for information exchange, but easily add or transition to a voice discussion whenever appropriate.

In talking to the Didlake HR Director, it was clear that simply having “policies” for communication would not be enough. Even with new technologies in place, we will still need natural courtesies of communication etiquette to smooth out the contact relationship between the person who wants to have a conversation and the other party.

Integrating Voice Calls With Text Messaging Exchanges

A common approach being taken today, where IM capabilities are available to employees , is to not blindly place a phone call to a location-based phone number that may be busy or won’t be answered for a variety of reasons, but rather to make real-time contact with a less interruptive, more “virtual,” IM exchange first. Then, with mutual agreement, the parties can switch to a voice call (e.g., “click-to-call/talk”). However, even then there must be a comfortable procedural etiquette for both parties to follow. Maybe voice connections within a current text messaging exchange between people who are already communicating will simply start with a polite message that says, “Can we talk?”

Within an existing IM exchange, the response can be an immediate or scheduled voice connection. Within an asynchronous email exchange, it could escalate to either a real-time IM exchange and/or a call connection, based on presence availability.

It is the traditional ”blind” and interruptive person-to-person call attempts that cause the greatest amount of time wasting, because busy people are just not that “available” for ad hoc voice conversations, even with mobile devices. Since direct person-to-person asynchronous messaging has become so universal, initial business contacts don’t have to necessarily be with a real-time voice conversation. With UC and telephony presence ‘federation,” however, we should expect ad hoc phone call attempts in the future to be replaced by simple and contextually “intelligent” contact procedures. This can include orchestrating an “as soon as possible” callback option based on presence availability, when both parties are indeed available, rather than wasting time unnecessarily with frustrating back and forth caller messaging ("telephone tag") or frequent hang-ups and retries.

UC Policies Role For HR?

All the press about enterprise UC implementation has focused primarily on the enterprise “decision makers” for organizational areas that would be most affected, i.e., line-of-business management and IT technology management. However, the individual end users, who must also directly benefit from UC in order to gain practical acceptance and adoption of new technologies, have to be represented also. Since HR is an enterprise administration point for supplying employee work environment needs, perhaps they can include overseeing policies for effective use of UC capabilities as part of their responsibilities, especially for off-premise teleworkers.

The inquiry from the HR Director from Didlake suggests that HR will get involved in how people do their jobs most effectively, and understanding new UC communications usage will certainly play a strong role there. In effect, HR can be a practical buffer between business management, IT management, and the individual end user in terms of defining the UC requirements for different job categories, as well as for different work environments of the organization’s end users.

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 published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically plan enterprise migrations from current communications technologies to a UC environment. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

Who Really Knows Business End User UC Needs?

August 8, 2008

Who In The Enterprise Should Represent End User Needs for UC?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

It’s getting very obvious that with mobile communications, teleworking, CEBP, and UC, every business end user will require more personalized capabilities than the traditional person-to-person forms of contact. The value of UC applications will also vary from business to business, as well as from individual to individual. The latter will be based upon their job responsibilities, as well as well as their work environments. So, when it comes to UC migration planning for UC, who really knows what end users need today vs. tomorrow?

Do We Need a New “C” Level Position In The Enterprise Organization?

Business management can take responsibility for business processes, but it is going to be difficult to also worry about every end user in the group and how they are using new UC capabilities. Did business management ever look at employee effective use of telephones in the past? The only thing they usually cared about was long distance charges, and even there, they simply asked telecom to report excessive usage.

So, if we now need to look at both effective and efficient business communications across all forms of contact, who will be qualified to determine what end users need and to evaluate the new usage metrics that UC can generate?

I don’t want to get into creating a new job title for overseeing UC planning and usage management, when we are having a difficult time defining what “UC” is all about. However, UC usage management has to be more than just about the costs of the technology and the ROI to the enterprise (UC-B), because it also has to fit the needs of different individual end users like a glove (UC-U) in order to be effective. In particular, Mobile UC, which will provide the greatest amount of productivity for both end users and business process, will demand the greatest amount of personalization and usage management oversight.

So, put your thinking caps on and get creative – send me your thoughts so we can put someone in charge of UC when it gets into your organization, including job title, skill requirements, and job responsibilities. (Should HR get involved?).

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 published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically plan enterprise migrations from current communications technologies to a UC environment. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

Unified Communications Pays Off For Deadlines

August 6, 2008

Looking For Real Business Payoffs From Unified Communications?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Reducing operational costs, end user personal productivity, and even customer satisfaction have been thrown at the unified communications wall as justifications for implementing business UC technologies by enterprise organizations.

If you have been keeping up with all the blogs about the ROI of Business UC and how to plan a practical migration to unified communications, you will have noticed that everyone is emphasizing the importance of communicating with people relative to specific business process performance. That has become the centerpiece for prioritizing UC implementations. This view logically highlights the communication delays (“human contact latency”) caused by people in business process workflows as “hotspots” that can be significantly improved with the flexibility and intelligence that UC applications bring to the business operations table.

UC benefits should result in faster and better business process performance, which in turn would reduce costs, generate faster revenues, and minimize any losses or penalties that delays and missed “deadlines” could cause. It is the “missed deadline” penalty that I see as a key driver that may get overlooked in implementing UC by a business organization. This is the business productivity ROI (“UC-B”) that will get the attention of enterprise management.

Normal Business Communications vs. “Deadlines”

Wherever there are delays in operational performance because of difficulties in making contact with a person, UC communication flexibility and “intelligence” will help “streamline” any standard business process. The ROI from reducing such “human contact latency” will vary depending upon the value of the business process itself, as well as the amount of improvement that can be realized from UC. However, if there is no big penalty caused by a communication delay, e.g., a day or two, the benefits to a business process will be marginal.

Typical workflow planning allows for reasonable human interactions and task performance, both as individuals and as part of a group. Should there a significant payoff in faster revenues or lower operational costs (including lower headcount, overtime, etc.), than there is a good case for implementing UC to “streamline” a business process.

Where Do “Deadlines” Fit In?

Usually, a “deadline” problem arises because something happens unexpectedly or goes wrong in normal business process. So, although it is something that must be expected, it is usually not part of routine procedure, but an exception that may other people.

While it is nice to streamline normal processes, it is usually more critical to streamline any procedure that can be impacted by a “deadline” problem. The consequences of failing to meet a deadline situation can range from loss of life to loss of business and higher costs. So, we see communication priorities escalating and UC capabilities being exploited as soon as a deadline issue surfaces within a business process.

Deadlines can be monitored by either people or automated processes, and both should be able to trigger the appropriate response process, including notifying all the appropriate people involved as soon as possible. That is where the flexibility of multimodal communications and mobile devices come into a play to minimize the “human contact latency” of telephony and messaging.

So, when looking at business process efficiency, business organization should be looking at both “normal” work” flow operations, as well as the “exception” cases where bigger losses will result because of human contact latency. Automated monitoring and reporting of such exception situations will be a step forward in minimizing the delays of human involvement to prevent or remedy operational problems. However, that is really only the beginning of a solution that requires people to be communication-accessible and responsive as efficiently and as flexibly as possible, and not just through voice connections either!

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 published a comprehensive UC eBook that focuses very heavily on defining the various components of UC and how to systematically plan enterprise migrations from current communications technologies to a UC environment. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!