UC and Telephone Call Human Latency

July 27, 2008

What “Human Latency” Does UC Help?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

“Unified Communications” is quickly moving up the ROI food chain for business organizations as the focus shifts from cost reductions to business process efficiencies. This shift in emphasis will require looking at combining the use of different communication technologies from both an individual user perspective and from their impact on all the key people involved a particular business process. In the new world of Internet networking, I see this kind of integration and interoperability being a “mash-up” of business application and communications software, converged voice and data transport on wired and wireless networks, and, last, but not least, multi-modal desktop and mobile end user devices.

Industry pundits have sharpened their search for the value of UC in improving business process performance by focusing on reducing “human (contact) latency.” That can mean any kind of process delay waiting for human intervention and action. From a UC perspective, the focus is not on human skills for task performance, but on the speed and efficiency of making contact and delivering information to a person involved in completing a task. With increasing process automation, real-time contacts to people are being initiated by automated business applications, in addition to traditional person-to-person contacts.

Telephone Calling “Latency”

Traditional, wired telephony will be impacted significantly, as UC applications help remove the “human latency” inefficiencies of person-to-person telephone calls. Because such calls require real-time interaction and coordination, they must be efficient and effective for both callers and call recipients, in order to minimize human contact latency of all parties and to maximize both individual productivity and business process efficiency.

For a caller (contact initiator), such latencies stem from the following:

· Knowing who to call

· Knowing where they are or which phone number to call

· Initiating a call to a device or location with no guarantee of contact

· Not getting any useful contact information when there is no one to answer the call attempt

· Leaving a voice message (when there is a busy signal or no answer) would be the beginning of “voice mail jail,” inefficient voice message retrieval, manual message transcriptions, and the delays of “telephone tag.” These inefficiencies are exacerbated when there is no efficient means of timely message notification, message “reply” options to outside callers, or “call return” capability.

For a call recipient (callee), the lack of the following can reduce efficient call activities as part of a business process:

· Having access to an incoming call regardless of location and network connection (mobility)

· Getting immediate call notifications regardless of other activities

· Knowing who or what kind of caller is calling

· Knowing why they are calling

· Have contextual information about prior contacts

· Getting selective notification of urgent or expected telephone messages regardless of location or mode of notification, along with immediate message access and response (reply) in any modality of communication

· Have the ability to multi-task non-voice forms of messaging while in voice conversation with a caller

Voice calls have always been the primary means of real-time, person-to-person business communications until the recent advent of Instant Messaging (IM), which also brings with it the benefits of a rich, visual interface and “virtual” access, rather than a fixed location like a wired desktop telephone.

Enter Presence Management

IM introduced its own brand of more efficient contact initiation through presence management and a personalized “buddy list” of people whose IP network accessibility and availability were dynamically tracked in real time. These evolved into public enterprise services that monitored network device connectivity as well as personalized status information supplied by individual users sharing the service. The primary benefit of presence information has been to enable an authorized contact initiator to check the current contact accessibility of a specific recipient for an IM exchange, or, if directly integrated with the recipient’s phone system, it can indicate if the recipient is already “busy” on a phone (“telephony presence”).

Presence information does not necessarily, however, create faster communication contact. Presence indicates “connectivity” but not really “availability.” Prospective senders of asynchronous email messages, therefore, would gain little from such presence information, other than perhaps the fact that because the recipient is connected online to the Internet at the moment, they are therefore likely to be notified about and have convenient access to a new email message.

However, because IM is both real-time and, unlike a voice connection, allows visual multi-tasking, it has become an alternative means of initiating a voice phone call between people who have a ”person-to-person” relationship. Rather than guessing about the availability of the person to take a phone call, presence information and IM communication allow the contact initiator to check for accessibility to a call recipient and request permission via IM to make a call before blindly making a call attempt. With such a “pre-call” connection that is phone-number independent, all sorts of contextual contact information can be presented to the callee before the voice connection is actually made. Think of it as an IM-based “screen pop,” which can also provide “click-to-call” capabilities.

That kind of capability can reduce much of the human latency described earlier that has become the main productivity target of UC.

Mobility and Presence

Whatever benefits presence technology can bring to traditional business phone calls, they will be further increased when applied to phone calls to or from mobile users. A voice call or message is often a practical form of contact interface for mobile people away from their desks, but dynamic availability and costs are more of an issue for mobile users. So, not only do mobile users want to avoid wasting time calling others fruitlessly, they also want to avoid taking calls when they are busy with other activities. Accordingly, they will need to manage the retrieval of voice message information they receive more easily and efficiently.

Voice mail technology is now being targeted to exploit more efficient visual interfaces of “smart communicators” (aka “smart-phones”), which can accommodate email, SMS, and IM, as well 3G web applications. (Witness the popularity of the iPhone’s “Visual Voicemail!”) In addition, automated transcription of voice messages into text messages, like email and SMS, is becoming a practical service offering for voice mail recipients.

Minimizing “Human Contact Latency”

While better and more flexible user interfaces indeed contribute to increased end user productivity by a few minutes, e.g., contextual “click-to-call,” and IP network connections will reduce the costs of access, significant business process efficiencies will be also be derived from reducing the delays of “blind” contact attempts that fail. This includes calling phone numbers that are usually busy, don’t answer, or are answered by the wrong party.

Business communications are no longer just “person-to-person” contacts, but increasingly “process-to-person” or “person-to-process-person” contacts, like telephone self-service (IVR) applications that allow access to any available live assistance. Business process applications can also proactively exploit the flexibility of UC as contact initiators to deliver information messages immediately and directly to a person. Unified messaging capabilities enable such messages to be delivered in any mode that the recipient requires.

The bottom line, however, for reducing human contact latency is that individual end users, whether inside or outside an organization, have to be able to initiate and respond to business contacts wherever they are, in whatever modality of contact is available to them, and as independently of the other parties as possible. The primary exception will remain synchronous conferencing (voice, video conversations) that are specifically “person-to-person.” This is where callers may benefit from “ASAP” (As Soon As Possible) call connections that will exploit federated presence and availability management technology along with “smart-phone” mobility. That combination will make a voice connection as soon as all parties are available and accessible.

What Do You Think?

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

"I Want My Unified Communications!"

July 20, 2008

What Will Business People Call “UC?”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As a result of the complex convergence of communication application functions, network infrastructures, and user interfaces, technology providers are being forced to redefine their telecommunication product and service offerings within the context of unified communications (UC). One of the better objective descriptions of all the application functionality that the industry is starting to offer to the enterprise market can be found in a new and comprehensive UC market analysis report from long-time analyst and UC Strategies co-founder, Blair Pleasant, CommFusion, LLC. For anyone contemplating getting into business communications, this experienced and objective analysis of who is doing what in the industry is a "must read."

Everyone may agree that “UC” and IP Telephony will be gradually swallowing up traditional voice telephone communications in both the business and consumer markets, but it has not exactly become a useful term for end users, nor yet created any viral demand from end users. There are practical reasons why this is so, including:

· UC technologies are still evolving and not as a single “package,”

· Communication functions are becoming more software based and device-independent, and therefore evolving differently from different technology providers,

· New multimodal devices are offering a variety of different form factors for UC capabilities and flexible user interfaces (visual, speech) through 3G mobile “smart-phones (e.g., Apple iPhones), desktop PC “softphones” and IP screenphones,

· New interoperability standards for end-to-end network contacts are still being defined, especially for person-to-person, real-time presence and availability (“federation”),

· Technology staffs are getting reeducated and consolidating their responsibilities for supporting IP telephony and data applications.

These factors are delaying the pace of actual implementations of “UC,” and are also causing confusion in the marketplace about how to migrate cost-effectively to a UC environment. More importantly, however, is the need for individual end users to understand what UC will do for them as contact initiators and contact recipients in all forms of business communications. Without that understanding, there is little end user demand for implementing UC, which makes it easy for IT to postpone UC migration planning.

Will “UC” Ever Mean Anything To The End User?

It is also unfortunate that there are different value perspectives of UC that cloud understanding of business use of UC. We have enterprise business management, who are primarily focused on why and what UC technology will do to improve operations and the “bottom line.” We have IT management who worry about the cost of technology implementation and support, including replacing legacy telephony investments, integrations with other technologies, information security, system reliability, operational administration, regulatory accountability, and Total Costs of Ownership or Usage. And last, but not least, we have the individual end users, both inside and outside of the organization, that will need to adopt new ways of communicating enabled by UC, in order to realize expected efficiencies and operational benefits.

While it is all well and good to define UC from a technology and business operations perspective, end users will still only see their own communication application user interfaces, not the infrastructure. So, for them, email will still be text messaging, but, with UM/UC, exploiting the flexible use of speech interfaces and responses in other forms of message delivery and callbacks. With the new ability of the contact initiator to function more independently of a contact recipient, the two parties may not even know what technology each is actually using – they only see a message or a call (voice or video) request notification.

For this reason, end users will still focus on the specific communication applications they want to use, i.e., voice conversations, real-time or asynchronous messaging (with information exchange), exploiting the flexible choice of user interfaces they need/prefer at the moment, but not really caring how the infrastructure works to allow such flexibility. For the user, UC may mean the convenience of selecting how they want to communicate, but it won’t replace the specific communication applications they want to use. All they want from UC is seamless interoperability between all the modes of communication they can access from their communication device of choice.

Needless to say, the communication device they use will have to be “multimodal” in order to enable the flexibility of UC, particularly necessary when mobile. So, its no wonder that the arrival and rapid adoption of ‘smart-phones” by consumers will be the biggest driver for UC demand. The question is, will this demand be viewed by end users simply as part of their “mobility” requirements, as opposed to “UC” requirements for their desktops?

Unfortunately, enterprise IT has been very resistant to supporting end user mobile “smart-phones,” but perhaps that will start to change now that Apple’s new version of iPhone software provides more functionality for the needs of business users. Like the PC in the past, end users will decide what tools and services they want to use to do their jobs and probably what to call them. So, don’t expect the names of the major application “piece-parts” of UC to disappear in favor of just “UC,” nor will a proprietary software “UC” suite be able to lock out best-of-breed service options.

What Do You Think?

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

The Metrics of UC Productivity

Filling A Gap Between UC-U and UC-B: Is It "UC-G?"

by Art Rosenberg , The Unified-View

The recent UC Summit, organized by UC Strategies, was highlighted by defining productivity benefits at two different levels. One was for the individual end user who gained personal time-savings and convenience from UC technologies (UC-U), the other was the performance efficiency of a business process in terms of both quality and speed of process completion (UC-B). Some of this was described in the eBook, Unified Communication Cutting Through the Hype, published earlier this year.

While both perspectives are Publish Postvalid and important, there is a gap between the two. Because most business processes and work flows involve more than one person, it becomes critical to business process performance that all the individuals who are involved in the process (work flow) do so as efficiently as possible. That means that they must be able to initiate contacts with people as quickly and flexibly as possible, and be accessible and respond to contacts in a timely manner as contact recipients, to minimize any delay in the process as a whole. If a key decision maker or action taker should be delayed for any reason in their ability to communicate, that can impact a currently active time-sensitive business process with delays that could have significant consequences to the organization. So, the benefit of UC improving personal productivity (UC-U) for communicating more flexibly, more easily, and faster in any work environment, can also have a direct impact on (UC-B).

I recognized this years ago when first looking at the need for UC. I suggested then that UC-B performance must take into account the performance of individual users who can cause such delays to the performance of the “group” as a whole, especially in time-critical situations. Having alternative resources to fill the human availability gap is a typical business strategy that has long been used in call centers, for example, to handle real-time phone calls. However, whenever there is a requirement for a specific expertise or authority, then such an individual has to maximize their communication accessibility and responsiveness for the efficiency of the group and the business process, not just for themselves.

“Group productivity” or “UC-G” can be described as the flexible accessibility for everyone participating in a business process to receive and respond to timely information and people contacts as quickly as possible. UC capabilities, coupled with mobile accessibility, will maximize UC-G for the individual user as well as the business process. For this reason, it will be important to identify specific users who are key to a high priority business process and insure that they are fully equipped to exploit the benefits of UC technologies. So, for example, doctors and nurses who must be notified that a patient is in a life-threatening state, cannot afford to be without mobile devices that allow them to be accessed by people and information wherever they are. Business situations have similar kinds of demands when there deadlines or costly problem situations that need to be fixed as quickly as possible to minimize losses.

UC flexibility has to extend beyond the business premises and include people outside the organization who are involved or affected by a business process. This means that premise-based UC alone will not be adequate when customers and business partners need to be involved in a time-sensitive business process. UC-G will therefore have to involve capabilities like “federated presence” in order to deal with such outside contacts as effectively as possible. Similarly, contact metrics to track communication efficiency with people inside or outside the organization will be useful in identifying UC needs that the organization doesn’t have direct control over, but which will still impact the organization’s business process performance.

What do you think? We welcome your comments.

Should Voicemail Die or Join UC?

July 12, 2008

The Voice of the Users – Should Voicemail Die or Change to Fit UC?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Michael Arrington, technology writer on the web, caught my attention by posting a blog entitled “Think Before You Voicemail.” It started off by saying “Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.” I think that the message has some merit but for whom, the callers or the call recipients?

He goes on to complain about what everyone already knows, that voice message management and retrieval has always been awkward and inefficient (compared to text messaging). His blog certainly struck a nerve with his web audience, generating over 250 comments up till now, debating whether voicemail should die or not. (Many observed the truism that personal phone calls deserve voice messages, but we are most interested in business contacts here!). The bottom line of all the comments shows that change is needed in handling messages, but it’s really up to individual users to decide how they want to send or to receive any type of message.

The main cause of the voice mail problem that Arrington complains about is due to the fact that the bulk of voice messages come from failed called attempts, better known as “telephone answering” or “caller messaging,” and telephone interfaces are limited to sequential voice output, coupled with cryptic touchtone codes for user controls. For the typical caller who landed in “voicemail jail,” it is pretty simple to just leave a voice message like on an answering machine, but for the recipient, it is not so simple to manage voice messages compared to text messaging on a screen interface.

Who Is Really Controlling Voicemail Use?

Legacy enterprise voicemail systems were designed primarily for two kinds of users – internal ‘subscribers” who had the benefit of sending and replying to other voice mail subscribers on the same company system or voice mail network, or outside callers who could only leave a message as second prize if their call attempt failed because of a “busy” or “no answer” condition. Because of the richer information content afforded by email, most business enterprise voice mail systems today deal primarily with outside callers and their voice messages. “Call return” capabilities allow a callback to be initiated, but those return call attempts are just as “blind” as the original call. (That’s we get the legendary “telephone tag” stats that say, “three out of four call attempts don’t reach the intended party.”)

Traditional telephone answering voice messaging has always really been under the control of the contact recipient, not the outside caller, who is not a “subscriber.” So Arrington’s admonition, “Think Before You Voicemail” is not really appropriate for callers who don’t have any choice, other than to “zero” out to an operator or hang up, once they land in “voicemail jail.”

Time to Change Voicemail?

Now that screen-based “smartphones” (like Apple’s iPhone or RIM’s Blackberry) that accommodate both text and voice messaging are becoming the desired communication device of mobile consumers, it is certainly time to question the role of traditional voice mail as an application of business UC. More importantly, as I have been stressing in my column, it is time to consider the needs of the caller separately from that of the recipient, because they are certainly not identical.

Even though there is much talk about SIP-based “telephony presence” enabling a caller to quickly ascertain the accessibility of a person for an immediate voice connection (regardless of the device that needs to be connected), there still remains the question of effectively communicating when you just can’t connect for a person-to-person voice conversation. With the flexibility of unified communications, however, there are now alternatives to voice messaging from both the caller’s as well as the callee’s perspective.

These include:

· “ASAP” (As Soon As Possible) calls can automatically be arranged as soon as both parties are available using federated presence capabilities. It would still be appropriate for the caller to leave a message regarding the subject/purpose of the call, like in email, so that the call recipient will be able to properly be prepared for the callback.

· The call initiator can opt to use IM to make contact, if at a multimodal desktop or mobile device, and the contact recipient is indeed available. This approach is rapidly becoming a popular way to contact the recipient first, than initiate a voice connection by a “click-to-call” action, if appropriate.

· If it becomes necessary to leave a message asynchronously, voice is still convenient and efficient for the caller, but the recipient shouldn’t be forced to retrieve the message only with a voice/telephone interface (TUI). Transcribing the voice message into text enables the recipient to manage message retrieval and disposition more efficiently as part of email or mobile SMS messages. As I mentioned in my column last year, new “voice-to-text messaging” services are rapidly appearing as a service for recipients to replace their legacy voice mail messaging technology. However, there are other improvements that can be made to insure that such messages also enable more flexible response options.

So, we don’t see voice messaging as being “dead,” but the old limitations of voice mail should be a key starting point for the benefits of UC to be realized by the next generation of “callers” and “call recipients.” The question now is how will enterprise voice mail systems transition to UC, where voice transcription to text and visual interfaces can replace the shortcomings of the TUI? Can we give outside callers more control over their voice messages and still protect the recipients need for managing their accessibility and time efficiently?

What Do You Think?

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

End User Survey Feedback About UC

June 8, 2008

What Business End Users Really, Really Want From UC – IM/Presence Integration!

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

UC technologies are evolving at a fast clip, but the telecommunications industry is still not sure what new capabilities the business market wants to buy first. Accordingly, UC technology providers have been sponsoring a slew of market surveys and studies to prove that their product and service offerings are the right way to go. The problem is that they may be surveying the wrong people asking the wrong questions.

Most notably, many surveys are asking IT management what end users want from UC technology, but do they really know? One new study of the SMB market showed that most management respondents are not even familiar with the term “unified communications,” let alone know exactly what it can do. So, to take it a step further and ask IT what their end users need from UC is clearly going to lead to poor results.

End Users Who Know What UC Does

Because there have been some implementations of new UC capabilities starting to take place, it is now possible to research end users with such experience about real results. Asking such end users directly about the value of UC capabilities would be helpful for a number of reasons, including:

· Understanding the specific business communication “pain points” that individual end users feel interfere with doing their jobs better and more efficiently.

· Understanding how such “pain points” depend upon individual work environments and operational needs.

· Understanding which business relationships can benefit from UC capabilities available to the different parties.

· Understanding which UC capabilities are needed most by which end users and the relative value they will have to which business processes for priority planning.

However, if end users are not familiar with new UC capabilities, it will be difficult for them to be interested in using UC, let alone tell anyone what they really need or want.

Surveying End Users With UC Experience

A breath of fresh air in UC market research was delivered by UC Strategies colleagues Blair Pleasant and Nancy Jamison with their survey report on end users who were actually using UC capabilities. They discussed their results in a new white paper and in a webinar sponsored by Genesys, with a couple of surprises.

Here are some quick observations on some of their interesting study findings:

· IM and associated Presence capabilities are becoming the centerpieces of UC capabilities. Not only is it replacing short phone calls but is also becoming a key element of more efficient person-to-person contact activities.

· Because UC cannot necessarily guarantee real-time availability of a specific individual for a voice conversation, either an alternate person, an alternative form of communication, or a future conference call will have to be scheduled. Business process performance metrics must consider all these alternatives in determining the requirements for efficient business communications.

· Most end users in the survey talked about UC benefits from a contact initiation perspective (person-to-person), especially when there is a time-sensitive problem to be resolved by other people. With UC flexibility, such contact initiation (notification) will become increasingly more automated, whereby a real-time monitoring application detects the problem first and directly notifies all involved or available people accordingly (process-to-person). UC enables more efficient business communications through more flexible, multimodal, and “intelligent” or “contextual” person-to-process-to person contact initiation, rather than traditional blind, “person-to-person,” location-based phone calls.

· As pointed out in the survey report, UC isn’t “all roses” yet, because increased accessibility through mobility doesn’t mean availability to talk or exchange text messages. Personal contact management is still a challenge. Furthermore, presence federation across networks and enterprise boundaries is not here yet, so “availability” status information is still limited.

My Observations

Because of the high perceived value of real-time contacts (voice calls, IM), the survey respondents seem to have ignored the role of asynchronous messaging, particularly unified messaging (UM), as part of useful UC capabilities. Asynchronous messaging is not just “second prize” when you can’t connect in real-time, but is also a much more efficient and increasingly used form of one-way and two communication and information exchange when real-time voice conversation is not needed. Messaging is therefore also very strategically positioned to provide integrated, contextual “click-to-call” or “click-to-chat” from messages and address books, instead of traditional manual touchtone dialing or IM attempts.

There was little mention by respondents of the benefits of UC when mobile, other than for real-time connections. That may reflect their ignoring asynchronous messaging functions as part of UC at the desktop (see above). UM flexibility in allowing messages to be independently created or retrieved with either voice or visual interfaces is most useful when the user is mobile and therefore subject to environmental constraints in the choice of communication interface medium. However, the report does highlight the productivity benefits of mobility to business operations and processes as part of the UC framework.

Most importantly, the report highlights the fact that the business value of UC will be reflected in how people can do their jobs faster and better. Individual end users must, of course, understand what UC does for them, either as contact initiators or contact recipients, rather than how the technology infrastructure works or will cost. Apparently, there has been a lack of market education from the business user perspective, so the experiences reflected in this kind of report will also be helpful in driving greater end user understanding and demand for UC.

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 migrate current business communications to UC. Take a look and see if it answers your questions!

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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