UC ROI, ROI, ROI

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

April 10, 2007

“ROI, ROI, ROI” -On Aligning UC Migration With Business Process Priorities and Applications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Fred Knight, Publisher of Business Communications Review magazine, in the first UC Strategies webinar on the highlights of the recent VoiceCon Spring 2007 show, pointed out that UC, just like “basic” IP telephony, is facing the “ROI challenge.” He claims that productivity benefits are the “the last refuge of scoundrels,” and that averaging individual user productivity of a few hours a year is “not convincing” to enterprise management.

“Macro-productivity” for Business Process Performance

We can’t disagree with that argument, having addressed that issue a few years ago by differentiating such individual “micro-productivity,” the time saved by a user because of easier and faster communication technologies, from “macro-productivity,” which reflects the time saved in the performance of a business process task because of more efficient communications between all the people involved. Clearly, improved micro-productivity contributes to greater macro-productivity, but the major ROI value to the enterprise really comes from the timeliness of completing a specific business process, not the time spent by an individual user.

Customer-facing communications are usually where revenue generating or customer satisfaction ROI can be realized. So, for example, when an order process or a customer billing issue can be resolved more quickly through faster communications with the right people, greater customer retention and faster bill payment become the bottom line payoffs to the enterprise.

Another differentiator between micro and macro productivity is that what might be an easier and faster way for a message originator to do, e.g. , speaking voice message content, may be more difficult and time-consuming than text for the message recipients in a workflow process. That will be particularly important for reviewing and managing message information content quickly and easily.

Unified messaging and visual voicemail capabilities that enable a recipient to convert voice messages to text provides a convenient way to satisfy the needs of both message originators and recipients, providing time-saving micro-productivity to both parties and macro-productivity to the business process interchange. Conversely, the response to a text or voice message can be a text or voice message, an IM interchange, or a call return that can be quickly initiated within the context of the message.

So, Where’s the ROI of Macro-productivity?

We have already indicated that individual communication time-savings may or may not pay off directly to the enterprise and that enterprise management will not be impressed by that kind of ROI, even though end users will benefit. What will get management attention, however, is any significant efficiency improvement in a key business process, especially those involving revenue generating customer contacts. It is here that contact efficiencies between people, both inside and outside the organization, that resolve problems or speed up transactions, can affect the enterprise bottom line from a business process performance perspective.

By making all participants in a key business process, including internal experts, decision-makers, problem report initiators, action takers, etc., more efficient as both contact initiators and recipients/responders through more flexible UC capabilities, the business process itself will become more efficient. The payoff to the enterprise will be faster revenue generation, avoidance of costs, or a combination of both. The more nebulous but still critical benefit of increased customer satisfaction and greater customer retention and revenue is also a key ROI benefit of more flexible customer contact efficiencies that UC technologies can provide to a business process.

Although “hard dollar” cost savings are always important to enterprise management, they don’t necessarily improve business processes. The investment in UC must pay off to end users in doing their jobs easier, faster, and better, and to enterprise business management, which must realize value from more efficient work flow that involves people. What binds these two ROI perspectives together are the business processes that users are involved in (job performance) and the overall efficiency of those business processes. However, there are many business processes that make up enterprise business activities and they will have different payoffs to the enterprise bottom line.

UC Migration and Mobilization

From an end user perspective, it is very apparent that the value of UC to business communications will correlate very strongly with user mobility. This will be true simply because mobile users will need the dynamic flexibility of UC to insure timely and efficient communications in environments where either hands-free/eyes-free user interfaces (speech) or silent communications (text) are necessary.

Accordingly, we were very impressed with a best-selling technology book published by Nokia, “Work Goes Mobile,” which describes how Nokia approached the task of making their workforce mobile. What was most interesting, was that the rationale and justification for selectively migrating Nokia employees to mobile communications is basically similar to that required for migrating an enterprise to UC. That is, the productivity ROI of communications associated with high value business processes and applications was a key consideration for user mobility implementation.

Nokia surveyed various types of users in their organization regarding the way they communicated, and correlated the value of the associated business processes with the need for faster access through mobile communication access. This gave them the priorities for mobilizing different end users, as well as projections of benefits to the business processes from faster and more efficient contacts.

In discussing their approach, with one of the books authors, Michael Lattanzi, I pointed out that enterprise migration to UC will need the same kind of migration planning. This will include identifying high value business processes that will justify end user UC capabilities, as well as greater mobile accessibility. UC capabilities can be considered as “horizontal” applications that are the easiest to implement, will have minimal impact on end user procedures, and will generate broader benefits to the enterprise, while specific business processes may be “vertical” applications that will require greater technology integration for information access, will change end user procedures and need for training for a small group of users, but can be very strategic to business competition.

“The Chicken and the Egg” - IT, Communications, and Business Applications

IT responsibilities for business communications are two-fold. The first is to identify and implement new technology to make business processes more efficient; the second is to do so most cost-effectively. However, it is business management that has to first identify and define operational business problems and solution strategies, including the needs for:

· Information access (vertical applications)

· Communication contacts with people (horizontal applications)

· Relative value to the enterprise

Step one, in my book, is to identify the significant communication problems with existing business processes. These can include one or more of the following general concerns:

· Difficulty of direct, immediate information access by end users

· Lack of automated business applications that cause unnecessary dependencies on people availability and their performance. This can include vertical business applications that could automate time-sensitive information delivery or notifications to specific people

· Any communication technology deficiency that contributes to the “human contact latency” which slows down business process performance:

- A communications process that is location dependent, i.e., requiring a person to be at a specific location just to gain access to information or to people.

- A communications process that is restrictive as to the medium that must be used (text, speech), or the flexibility to be used by in real-time or asynchronously by either a contact initiator or contact recipient/respondent.

· A communication device that is restricted to one particular medium of contact or information content that will limit its use for different forms of business communications activities or information exchange with people.

The second step would be to evaluate the benefits of UC capabilities for these existing problems, as well as to the specific end user groups who will be affected. The evaluation may be to simply estimate the soft ROI of such benefits, including individual time productivity (“micro-productivity”) or the task productivity of all the people involved in a business process (“macro-productivity”). It will be useful to elicit input from individual end users to correlate their involvement with different business processes. (Stay tuned for a new and convenient way to do that!)

A practical third planning step for any new technology which may be an unknown quantity for an enterprise, is to “try before buy” by trialing selected business processes with UC applications. This will enable IT to gain experience with supporting the new technologies, confirm user benefits, and identify migration issues.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

News From UC Strategies

To get an idea of the different perspectives and issues involved with implementing UC technologies, go to the UC Strategies web site for better insights on migrating the enterprise to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UC Strategies experts at TMC’s IT Expo.

Mobile UC, Presence, and Multimodal Self-services

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

March 27, 2007

Why Mobility Will Change Telephony –The User Perspectives

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I noticed a timely article on the Web that commented on the new “etiquette” for mobile phone users that is becoming acceptable call handling behavior, especially when text messaging facilities are also available. Among the main points were that:

1. Mobile call recipients have to exploit call screening because mobile situations cannot be handled as easily as desktop environments.
2. Voice mail messaging options for callers are still confined to failed telephone answering attempts, i.e., a caller cannot leave a voice message directly, without first ringing a phone that doesn’t get answered.
3. Rather than playing “telephone tag,” text messaging is becoming an acceptable response to a voice message.

While this reflects some communication progress for consumer behavior, it doesn’t necessarily cover the needs of different business contact situations, nor does it reflect the coming impact of presence and availability management technology. However, it does highlight why planning for migration to unified communications is not just about VoIP and IP telephony, and must consider all aspects of user interfaces and contact procedures.

Why “Mobile Presence” and Availability are Not the Same as at the Desktop

Everyone has been impressed with “desktop IM” and it’s strategic use of presence management to detect both network connectivity and availability status information. IM presence has been extended by all the IP telephony providers to include “telephony availability,” which will indicate whether or not you are busy on your desktop extension phone. While this new capability sets the stage for contact initiators to first determine the contact recipient’s accessibility, rather than blindly initiate a call attempt, reports from end users indicate other repercussions.

At VoiceCon Spring 2007 earlier this month, there were several comments from end users to the effect that even if they set their availability status as being “busy,” their “buddies” would still send an IM asking for a minute to discuss a quick question. While this may be very convenient and practical at the desktop, the same cannot hold true for the mobile recipient. Mobile users, unfortunately, will not be in a constant environment where they can always talk or always look at text messages. So, even though they have a multimodal “smart phone,” there is no easy way to constantly update recipient accessibility status and rules for visual vs. voice contacts to the contact initiators.

An obvious solution is the practical approach used in unified messaging. The message sender doesn’t worry about the message medium because it gets converted automatically at the recipient’s end upon actual delivery. Instead of ringing someone’s phone number which can provide limited information via caller ID, a call initiation will consist of an instant message, either voice or text, that provides the basic elements for a contact initiation, including:

1. Identification of the contact initiator
2. The subject/purpose of the contact
3. Contact modalities
4. Urgency

This would enable not only people to initiate real-time contacts with other people, but also automated business applications to do so as well. This would permit business applications to notify people about time-sensitive situations and enable a self-service response as well.

Exciting news from Intervoice - Conversation is an application, but speech is just an interface for next-generation multimodal, mobile self-services

Just as I was writing this piece, I received the big announcement from Intervoice launching the first commercially available product for developing self-service “UC” applications, based on the new W3C language standard, State Chart XML (SCXML), destined to replace CCXML as a call control language for VoiceXML. The announcement of Intervoice’s “Media Exchange” is the opening industry volley in transitioning telephone self-services to the UC world of more personalized and dynamic multimodal business applications and “click-to-contact live assistance.”

Automated voice-based self-service applications have traditionally been focused on wired desktop phones and their mobile counterpart, the cell phone. The user interface has been strictly voice-oriented, using the traditional touchtone keypad for input and voice output. This limited the applications to very short and simple ones to avoid time-consuming and error-prone sessions that callers absolutely hate. With the more recent availability of speech recognition, speech input simplified the input considerably, but didn’t do much for long prompts, error responses, and other forms of outputs. Clearly, voice is NOT ideal for self-service applications when compared with the visual GUIs that we are all taking for granted on the Web.

I have long been waiting for news from the technology developers to start treating the phone as a multimodal device, especially for mobile users as discussed above, and was pleasantly surprise by the Intervoice announcement. What is most key here is that this is not a traditional proprietary telephony technology that depends on locking up users to specific hardware devices, but is a standard that will be usable with all flavors of evolving ‘smart phones.” Telephony is indeed becoming emancipated from the TDM hardware world of the past!

In listening to the demo of Intervoice’s product announcement for Media Exchange, you can still see the rough edges in transitioning between visual and speech interfaces, or what I have called “transmodal communications.” As described earlier, the shift between interfaces will be based not just on “preferences,” but also on dynamic circumstances such as driving a car, walking in a noisy public space, etc. The demo’s chatty conversational voice prompts obviously can be replicated with visual prompts in order to speed up the interaction, even though inputs can still be either manual or spoken. There will be a prize for the best multimodal input/output flexibility that makes users happy with whatever mobile handheld devices they have, for any mobilized application, in any environment.

In any event, the news from Intervoice is most promising for the coming world of consumer mobile communications.

News From UC Strategies

To get an idea of the different perspectives and issues involved with UC technologies, go to the UC Strategies web site for better insights of what UC is really all about for the enterprise.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

For more insight on migrating to UC in the enterprise, you can review the presentations given by the UC Strategies experts at TMC’s IT Expo last month.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

UC Grows At VoiceCon Spring

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

March 11, 2007

VoiceCon Spring 2007 – Will Its Name Change to “UC” Too?

By now you must have read the headlines emanating from the originally small BCR conference that used to be focused on the PBX and telephone systems in Washington, D.C., but last week hit over 5,000 industry and enterprise attendees trying to prepare for the migration of telephony to unified communications. Don’t expect this to be a comprehensive report, because I couldn’t get to all the sessions that were presented there. The problem is that UC is not just about the proprietary and limited telephone endpoint for voice conversations any more, because all forms of messaging and video conferencing are starting to dominate the business communications spectrum.

However, because IP telephony is a key element of UC capabilities, replacing TDM telephony, both at the desktop and for mobility, is a threatening challenge to enterprise IT and traditional telecom technology providers. Every element of telephony that enterprise organizations have invested in is in the process of change and everyone in the enterprise will eventually be affected. So, its no wonder that everyone in the business communication industry (technology and services) is preaching the gospel of “UC migration” and everyone in the enterprise IT world is listening for the next telephony shoe to drop.

Shoes did drop in Orlando next week and you can read the details in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly online newsletter or at the UC Strategies web site.

Microsoft Challenges Telephony Industry With Software, But Siemens Counters

Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, highlighted the challenge to traditional TDM telephony, by claiming that in three years, software, rather than hardware, will reduce the average cost of desktop voice communications by 50%, because 40-45% of VoIP costs are in the endpoint devices.

When Fred Knight of BCR asked industry executives to comment on the Microsoft statement, Mark Straton, Sr. VP of Siemens, disagreed, claiming that in three years the IP telephony cost would be only 25% of current costs, but other costs, e.g., those related to integrating telephony with business process applications and other communications would increase.

Raikes was preceded by Cisco’s Charles Giancarlo, Senior VP of Cisco, who also emphasized the role of “open” software and business process applications in IP telephony. Cisco also announced their partnership with IBM to handle the business application software, while they take care of the hardware/software for networking, IP telephony, and their new TelePresence videoconferencing system for maximizing the face-to-face experience.

Another shoe that Microsoft dropped during Raikes’ keynote was the ability to dynamically improve network voice quality strictly through software processing, rather than through the network itself.

Enterprise Responsibilities for Mobile UC

I was privileged to moderate a knowledgeable panel of leaders in the mobile communications industry, which is moving from traditional voice devices and wireless text messaging to multimodal capabilities. Since the flexibility of UC is particularly needed when business users are away from their desktops, the role of “smartphones” is becoming important for enterprise organizations. The question is, what responsibility does the enterprise have for supporting such devices?

The response by the panel, made up of representatives from Nokia, Motorola, RIM, Ericsson, and Cisco, agreed that enterprise organizations will have to support mobile device independence, where individual users have different job needs, plus they want to carry only a single device. That includes using the same device, but with different capabilities, for their personal mobile needs as well.

What the enterprise will be responsible for is the control of enterprise information and access control from a user’s device, so that enterprise security cannot be compromised. Device management services can provide such remote control for a variety of devices that are physically located anywhere.

A question about the impact of presence management technologies and federation with public services and other enterprises showed the need for providing an efficient approach to exchanging current status information between mobile devices. This would apply to both “contact initiators” and “contact recipients” who would need to exchange status information across networks to determine how to communicate efficiently.

UC Is Not Just About Voice Technologies and Has Challenges for Everyone In The Enterprise

The VoiceCon show was overloaded with conference sessions and discussions on how and when to migrate towards different elements of UC. Unfortunately, UC is not a simple technology decision that can be made for everyone in the enterprise all at once, like desktop telephone systems used to be. Not only does IT have to plan how to migrate technologies that they will be responsible for, but also who to migrate and for what business process. This means that business management has to identify application priorities and ROI metrics, end users have to identify what UC capabilities will be useful for their job responsibilities and work environments, and existing legacy technologies have to be supported until they are replaced or not needed. No wonder every enterprise UC migration is going to be different and “best practices” will vary!

Even IT’s job of end user support and administration is going to require convergence and I was surprised to see, that with all the talk about UC and the emphasis on the IT audience, there were no sessions devoted to text messaging technologies (email, IM, SMS) and how their usage and support needs would be merged and consolidated with voice communications (telephony, voice messaging, and speech interfaces).

I commented on this to BCR’s Fred Knight and Eric Krapf, but the very name “VoiceCon” has been a barrier to UC subjects until now. So, don’t be surprised if that name gets changed real soon, as suggested by one keynote speaker at the conference. And don’t be surprised that the business application and text messaging providers will have a bigger piece of the UC pie.

To get an idea of the different perspectives and issues involved with UC technologies, go to the UC Strategies web site for better insights of what UC is really all about for the enterprise.

What Do You Think?

For more insight on migrating to UC in the enterprise, you can review the presentations given by the UC Strategies experts at TMC’s IT Expo last month. Go to:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/ITExpoPresentations.aspx

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

Say Goodbye to the Telephony User Interface (TUI)

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

February 17, 2007

The Fading Away of the TUI – Long Live “Visual” Call and Voice Message Management

The telephone has always been hampered by the fact that it started life with a non-visual interface. Instead, it was limited to special signaling inputs (dialing, touchtone) and audio outputs (tones, voice), better known as the Telephone User Interface, or TUI.

When voice messaging made its appearance on the scene in the early ‘80’s, it had to base its interface on the TUI as well, since the traditional telephone set was THE user input/output device for voice mail systems. After email became popular for business communications, voice mail systems started to integrate with email system PC interfaces to become what is now commonly referred to as “visual voice mail.” After many years, “visual voice mail,” with its greater efficiency for managing voice messaging activities, is becoming “hot” for a number of reasons.

1. First of all, the visual interface for managing voice messages is becoming part of the convergence of email and voice messaging technologies under one desktop unified messaging (UM) application server coming from Microsoft in their new Exchange 2007 offering.

2. Secondly, as multimodal IP telephony devices exploit screen interfaces both on the desktop (softphones, IP phones) and in handheld mobile devices, (“smartphones” like the Blackberries and the highly-discussed iPhone from Apple), voice messaging is finally becoming emancipated from the limitations of the TUI. There are even new mobile services, like the free CallWave Mobile that will capture your mobile device voicemail messages and automatically send them to your desktop PC for managing their retrieval and response through your email application.

Separating Church and State – IP Telephony and “Visual Call Management”

While text messaging has always been dependent upon screen interfaces, both for message management functions and message content, voice telephony was relatively limited in its use of a screen interface for end users. PBX attendants have had special, proprietary privileges for call management, by being able to see the “busy” status of all wired extension numbers on their special PC-based consoles. But not everyone could have that information. That is, until IP telephony came along to enable call management to move to personalized screentops.

Though IP telephony is still dependent on voice content transmission and network switching, it no longer is proprietary at the endpoint device interfaces, where the “rubber meets the road” for users. That is why there is great excitement in UC circles about enabling call initiation within the context of business process applications and online business tools. It opens the door to both:

1. Faster and easier contacts with specific people you know (e.g., “click-to-call” from your address book), but also

2. Faster connections to anyone who is available to support the online context of your contact attempt (like a call center group).

The IP infrastructure is obviously very critical to support the multimodal flexibility of UM and UC, but more important to end users will be the flexibility of a rich screen interface for both message management and call management. So, since “visual voice mail” has become the new kid on the block for UM, we should acknowledge “visual call management” as the key for making UC successful with conversational voice connections.

Teaching End Users New Interfaces

Marty Parker in his excellent article in BCR magazine article, “Voice Messaging in Transition” (February, 2007), on migrating legacy voice mail systems to UM/UC as an inevitable requirement for every enterprise organization, pointed out that end users, who are forced to memorize TUI touchtone commands for voice mail, will be very upset that their old interface investment will be replaced. While that used to be a big training problem when an old TUI was replaced by a new TUI, I would like to suggest that there are two ways to minimize that challenge.

1. Because a screen user interface can become available as part of the move to UM, both at the desktop and with mobile devices, the richer visual interface

a. Doesn’t have to be memorized

b. Will provided greater feature flexibility

c. Can be self-teaching

2. For “hands-free, eyes-free” mobile environments or where a legacy telephone device has to be used (e.g., a payphone) and a visual interface is not usable, the alternative to the TUI is the speech recognition interface. Speech recognition has matured to the point that it is a solid technology for user input, and may even be more efficient than keyboard inputs.

The bottom line is that visual screen outputs and voice inputs will provide greater user efficiency and flexibility whenever circumstances permit their use. That is a source of productivity ROI for business communications that I have categorized as “micro-productivity,” i.e., timesavings for the individual end user. Most importantly, both of these input/out technologies will minimize the training of end users for new UM/UC device interfaces for both messaging and telephone calls.

And we haven’t even talked about the user contact efficiencies expected from coming telephony presence management that will be absolutely dependent upon a visual interface!

What Do You Think?

For more insight on migrating to UC in the enterprise, you can review the presentations given by the UC experts at TMC’s IT Expo last month. Go to:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/ITExpoPresentations.aspx

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

Mobile Device Makers To Discuss UC Needs – Here Are The Questions!

I will be moderating a panel discussion about business UC and mobility with leaders in the mobile device industry, including representatives from:

· RIM

· Ericsson

· Motorola

· Nokia

· Cisco

The proposed topics and questions that will be discussed are shown below and you are invited to submit additional questions about such devices in enterprise communications and business applications mobilization.

“Merging Mobility and Unified Communications”

Proposed Key Questions:

1. What UC capabilities are available on mobile devices today? Can these integrate with the IP Telephony and UC infrastructures?

2. What are the key impediments (such as bandwidth or battery life) to end users’ enjoying the same functionality on a wireless UC application as its wired counterpart?

3. Can wireless UC solutions be implemented in conjunction with the enterprise infrastructure, or will service providers only offer these as their own standalone services?

4. Are video and collaboration solutions viable UC applications for mobile users today?

5. What are the different kinds of mobile communications usage that a business user’s device will have to support? When will they need more than one device, e.g., specialized applications, campus mobility vs. off-site usage?

6. Is it practical to allow business users to choose their own mobile devices for business and personal contacts, assuming separate contact numbers, applications, and contact management? Will dual operating systems and separate application clients be required? (Corporate liable vs. Employee liable device and services)

7. How much responsibility should the enterprise really take for mobile devices that business users will carry with them at all times? Who should support end users with software/hardware issues about different devices - the enterprise, the service provider channel, or the device provider channel?

8. What are the security issues for business usage of mobile devices and how can they be avoided/controlled? Will “virtual” storage of business information be a solution”

9. How will end user mobility needs impact the migration to unified communications?

10. What will be different about UC capabilities at the desktop vs. handheld devices? How will two forms of UC usage interact effectively?

11. Will handheld devices be suitable for customer-facing applications, where the customer information “screen pop” is a critical operational requirement? What other applications will be limited by handheld devices?

12. As mobile devices keep evolving into new form factor capabilities, how will end users migrate from older devices?

13. What ancillary input/output devices will mobile devices support and how?

14. How will the organization's desire to leverage employee presence data conflict with privacy rights of individuals and "big brother" concerns?

15. Can UC capabilities improve obstacles in global business collaboration by providing additional presence information (holidays, time zones, modified "international" work schedules, best communication method to reach user)?

16. What opportunities and obstacles (requirement for carrier certification of wireless devices, unique wireless LAN frequencies, standards, global travelers) are anticipated for UC across the globe?

The session will be taking place on Thursday, March 8^th, at the VoiceCon Spring 2007conference in Orlando. If you will be attending the show and are interested in the topics, please join us.

Discussing Mobility and UC at VoiceCon Spring 2007Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

February 17, 2007

Mobile Device Makers To Discuss UC Needs – Here Are The Questions!

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I don’t need to tell you what is going on with mobile “smartphones” because your emailbox must be loaded with reports and announcements from the GSM conference in Barcelona, just like mine is. Of course, I have always seen multimodal mobile devices as being key to driving end user demand for UC and UM, because that’s where the UC need and benefits will be greatest.

I will be moderating a panel discussion about business UC and mobility with leaders in the mobile device industry, including representatives from:

· RIM

· Ericsson

· Motorola

· Nokia

· Cisco

The proposed topics and questions that will be discussed are shown below and you are invited to submit additional questions about such devices in enterprise communications and business applications mobilization.

“Merging Mobility and Unified Communications”

Proposed Key Questions:

1. What UC capabilities are available on mobile devices today? Can these integrate with the IP Telephony and UC infrastructures?

2. What are the key impediments (such as bandwidth or battery life) to end users’ enjoying the same functionality on a wireless UC application as its wired counterpart?

3. Can wireless UC solutions be implemented in conjunction with the enterprise infrastructure, or will service providers only offer these as their own standalone services?

4. Are video and collaboration solutions viable UC applications for mobile users today?

5. What are the different kinds of mobile communications usage that a business user’s device will have to support? When will they need more than one device, e.g., specialized applications, campus mobility vs. off-site usage?

6. Is it practical to allow business users to choose their own mobile devices for both business and personal contacts, assuming separate contact numbers, applications, and contact management? Will dual operating systems and separate application clients be required? (Corporate liable vs. Employee liable device and services)

7. How much responsibility should the enterprise really take for mobile devices that business users will carry with them at all times? Who should support end users with software/hardware issues about different devices - the enterprise, the service provider channel, or the device provider channel?

8. What are the security issues for business usage of mobile devices and how can they be avoided/controlled? Will “virtual” storage of business information be a solution”

9. How will end user mobility needs impact the migration to unified communications?

10. What will be different about UC capabilities at the desktop vs. handheld devices? How will two forms of UC usage interact effectively?

11. Will handheld devices be suitable for customer-facing applications, where the customer information “screen pop” is a critical operational requirement? What other applications will be limited by handheld devices?

12. As mobile devices keep evolving into new form factor capabilities, how will end users migrate from older devices?

13. What ancillary input/output devices will mobile devices support and how?

14. How will the organization's desire to leverage employee presence data conflict with privacy rights of individuals and "big brother" concerns?

15. Can UC capabilities improve obstacles in global business collaboration by providing additional presence information (holidays, time zones, modified "international" work schedules, best communication method to reach user)?

16. What opportunities and obstacles (requirement for carrier certification of wireless devices, unique wireless LAN frequencies, standards, global travelers) are anticipated for UC across the globe?

The session will be taking place on Thursday, March 8^th, at the VoiceCon Spring 2007conference in Orlando. If you will be attending the show and are interested in the topics, please join us.

What Do You Think?

I will be reporting the results of the discussion in a future column, so if you have a pertinent question to be discussed, please let me know and we will try to cover it. Send your question to me at artr@ix.netcom.com,.

See Us at VoiceCon Spring 2007, March 5-8, Orlando, FL !

Apple's iPhone and Enterprise UC

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

January 17, 2007

Microsoft/Nortel UC Progress Report and Apple’s iPhone Spotlights “UC Smartphones” To Drive User Demand!

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Well, it’s about time that the unified communication “industry” has moved up the technology food chain to the real point of visible value from converged communication of UC, the end point device interfaces that every UC user will need for their personal (consumer) and business needs! Up till now we have been just laying the infrastructure groundwork for the real payoff of UC, the end users and the different applications they will personalize UC for. And we wondered why there was little end user demand from the enterprise market!

Progress report from Microsoft and Nortel highlights need for interface demos

Microsoft and Nortel presented more details of their joint UC development roadmap, where they basically report infrastructure consolidation at the platform level, along with the flexibility to accommodate migrations to new application servers and endpoint software clients at the desktop and mobile devices. Nortel President Mike Zafirovsky pointed to the SMB market as their first target for UC deliverables this year, expanding to the larger enterprise organizations that need to migrate more slowly and “gracefully” after that. The demo they gave to their in-house audience highlighted the power of native SIP-based presence and UC to dynamically switch communication modalities (email to IM), which I describe as “transmodal communications”, in addition to the more familiar speech user interfaces and unified messaging capabilities.

In response to a question from TMC’s Rich Tehrani about the need to first educate the enterprise market, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer complained that “unified communications means everything or nothing” to customers and that the only way customers “get it” is by seeing a demo of an application from the end user perspective. This confirms our view that the value of UC will be reflected in the user interfaces of communication applications, placed in the context of a business process (line-of-business or vertical industry applications).

That is why Microsoft and Nortel will be setting up hundreds of demonstration centers around the world, as well as centers for collaboration as a key step in “educating” business customers about what UC means to end users. Although I asked the question over the web about the impact of new the Apple smartphone, the “iPhone,” upon UC adoption, there wasn’t time to get an answer, so here’s our view of an answer.

The new Apple bringing more innovation to mobile communications?

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

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

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

“Different strokes for different folks!”

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

What Do You Think?

Let us know your opinion by sending us an email at artr@ix.netcom.com, or by commenting to our new blog. (http://unified-view.blogspot.com/)

Everything You Want To Ask About UC –

See Us at TMC’s Internet Telephony Show Next Week!

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Read my article on what enterprise users want from UC in the new issue of Internet Telephony magazine.
http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/0107/it-table-of-contents-0107.htm

UC-oriented Customer Contact Technology Articles

The Math of Customer UC: blog. (http://unified-view.blogspot.com/)

Read our exclusive articles below on hosted UC services for customer contact applications:

Online Customer Contacts: Online Self-service Needs Are Evolving

Converging Customer Self-services: What Technologies Need to Converge Between Online and Voice Self-Services?

Customer Voice Contacts: Smarter Call Center IP Telephony Routing

Stop Guessing! The Five Real Reasons For Migrating Your Call Center to IP

CosmoCom Unified Customer Communication Services

January 8, 2007

CosmoCom Adds “Unified Customer Communications”

Services To Enterprise UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

We’ve known CosmoCom ever since they were founded in 1996 to develop one of the first IP-based ACD systems in the industry. I was privileged to be invited to give a presentation to their development team to highlight the coming changes that the Web and email were bringing to traditional voice oriented customer interactions. Even then, they had a remarkably complete vision for applying what we now know as unified communication (UC) technology to customer communications.

As UC has shifted the attention of the enterprise market from IP network infrastructure (VoIP) to the converged communication applications that it will support, we talked recently with CosmoCom’s new President of CosmoCom Americas operations, Ben Eisner, about how UC will affect customer contact technologies. CosmoCom has been evolving their contact center software platform, CosmoCall Universe, as both a service provider offering and an enterprise product. They have adopted the term “Unified Customer Communications” or “UCC” to describe their customer contact UC capabilities.

1. The Unified-View: What do you offer today and for the future that leads the industry and is different and/or better than your competitors?

Eisner:

CosmoCom invented the all-IP contact center platform, and one set of advantages we have in the market comes from having the most mature and field-proven, all-IP technology. These include feature advantages such as agents anywhere, unified multi-channel queuing and routing, and ease of integration with the IT environment. IP is the key enabler of our UCC model, and for the rapid, low-risk, high-reward implementations we are developing a reputation for.

We also have a high capacity, high availability, carrier grade platform that provides multi-tenancy with tenant self-administration. This has given us a strong

position with top-tier service providers in the multi-tenant, hosted platform segment of the market, where the SPs can realize the greatest economies of scale. We now see the interest in hosted contact centers growing rapidly, and so our market position is supporting a growing revenue stream.

But what we are also finding is a groundswell of demand from large enterprises for exactly the same capabilities that have made us a leader in the service provider space, especially multi-tenancy. With its strong tenant self-administration capabilities, this feature allows enterprises to deploy our platform as a centralized, flexible, enterprise-wide contact center resource.

The key idea here is consolidation. One pool of licenses and one pool of skilled personnel can respond to a wide variety of distributed internal needs. Agents can be deployed and redeployed “virtually” as needed in any set of locations. Outsourcers can be effectively monitored and easily changed. And new applications can be implemented in a fraction of the time required in the old pre-consolidation model, where each application required its own dedicated local hardware system.

In conjunction with this growing demand from enterprises, our service providers are also becoming sales channels for supplying premise-based systems to their large enterprise customers. This means that in some regions we now have competitive advantages related to our channels as well as to our technology products.

2. The Unified-View: What does CosmoCom’s “Unified Customer Communications” (UCC) bring to the enterprise table?

Eisner:

Sometimes we use the playful tag line: “What’s U in UCC?” In other words, what is it that is really being unified? The answer is a very long list of things, more than we can cover in one interview, and we will be publishing a white paper on this subject. Of course, one of the basic items is the customer communication channel. As customers move away from using just traditional wired phones for information or live assistance to being multimodal users of what you have labeled “Consumer UC,” they can both initiate and receive any kind of business contact with an enterprise, using screen-based desktop or wireless mobile devices.

All such contacts, however, have to be tracked and managed in a “unified” way in order to maintain a responsive and consistent level of support by customer-facing personnel. We have therefore updated traditional call center operational and management applications and reporting to support such converged customer UC activities.

3. The Unified-View: Why is it important to distinguish internal or basic enterprise UC from Unified Customer Communications (UCC)?

Eisner:

Facilitating direct person-to-person communication within the enterprise, or even between enterprises, can increase productivity and reduce costs. We call this “Unified Enterprise Communication” or “UEC.” This is not the same as enabling customers to communicate via any channel with whoever is available and qualified in the enterprise. Customer satisfaction with the contact experience is more critical to the enterprise because it can directly impact customer retention and revenue generation. This is what we call UCC, and this is why we believe UCC is more significant from a business perspective than simply reducing communications costs.

True UC will encompass both UEC and UCC, and in fact will unify them into a greater whole, one in which the entire enterprise organization is finely tuned to respond to the customers that make its very existence possible.

4. The Unified-View: What role does SIP-based presence technology play in customer contact activities?

Eisner:

Unfortunately, some technology providers have simply “bolted” on internal presence-based IM to a traditional TDM contact center technology; that enables a traditional call handling agent to accept a customer call, then use internal IM to find an “expert” outside the call center to collaborate with before returning to the caller. While this is better than putting a caller “on hold,” then trying to locate an available expert by dialing different phone numbers, it is still not the best solution for the customer experience.

For us, SIP is a lot more than presence management. It’s at the core of making the whole enterprise “virtual” for customer contact assistance. Because anyone in the enterprise who has to deal directly with a real-time customer will require a complete customer information context to make the customer “experience” effective and efficient, a “screen pop” will be a critical prerequisite. With “intelligent,” automated routing to anyone in the enterprise, we enable that flexibility to support efficient “first contact resolution,” whether it is a customer phone call or an IM contact. And by including every “expert” in the virtual, SIP-based contact center, we maintain complete tracking and control of all customer contacts.

If you need to shield some experts from getting too many calls directly, you can put them in an agent group assigned to queues that never get calls directly, but only via transfer from a first-line agent. When a caller needs a particular kind of expert, the first-line agent can then find someone in a particular expert queue to consult with, conference-in, or transfer to. If the transfer is completed, it's going to a full-fledged agent capability, with all the associated screen pops etc. Even if it's just conferenced, it will still come with all the information and “screenpops.” This is true UC capability for customer contact.

One of the things we are doing to support this approach is pure economics. We charge for a pool of usage-time shared by a many agents. This is much more cost effective than paying for concurrent agents for the UC environment, because you want these informal agents logged in and available all the time, even though you don't actually use them very much.

5. The Unified-View: How does your UCC relate to customer self-service applications?

Eisner:

In a UCC world, self-service applications will have to be consistent across all channels while selectively exploiting the benefits of the specific interface of the device in use. As multimodal devices proliferate, new usability challenges and opportunities emerge. Last year we introduced what we call “IVVR” – that is, Interactive Voice and Video Response – to answer this challenge. IVVR is a great example of UCC in the self-service realm.

Just as the self-service applications need to be consistent, the transition from self-service to live help should be consistent. In other words, whatever has been learned about the customer during the self-service phase of the interaction needs to be presented to the live agent with the call. This has to be a channel-independent principle. And this is where our technology really shines.

6. The Unified-View: Why is there going to be a greater need for hosted and managed customer contact technology, as opposed to traditional enterprise CPE?

Eisner:

The SMEs want the features offered by the large enterprises, but don’t want to make the same big investments they have made. Hosted contact centers answer this need. At the same time, the large enterprises are just getting sick and tired of what they are spending every year per agent just to maintain their old technology infrastructure, and they are beginning to see that hosting is a viable alternative for them to consider as well.

Still, hosting is not for everyone. That’s why we are seeing that groundswell of interest from enterprises in the same capabilities that make our platform suitable for hosting. Enterprises who are not ready turn over their infrastructure needs to an outside service provider can gain many of the same benefits by “self hosting” their own platform for all the various contact center applications within their enterprises. This approach adds another level of unity to UCC – unity of applications.

7. The Unified-View - What market segments are you targeting and why? (Vertical, horizontal)

Eisner:

Of course we continue to target service providers globally. This means not only developing new service provider relationships, but also supporting the growth of our existing service providers, which translates directly into growth for CosmoCom.

We also target the internal customer care applications of our service providers, because our presence on the network side of these organizations gives us a place to start, and of course because telecom service providers represent one of the largest segments of the contact center market.

More broadly speaking, we target the high end of the enterprise contact center market, which is found not only in telecommunication service providers, but also in utilities, the public sector, the financial services industry, and others. These are the customers most likely to benefit from our strengths in large, highly distributed, “virtual” contact centers, and in supporting multiple, enterprise-wide applications on one platform via multi-tenancy with tenant self-administration.

Bringing this conversation full circle, these customer-rich and increasingly customer-centric organizations are also the most likely to adopt the UCC model that we discussed earlier, and we believe that we are in the strongest position, technologically and commercially, to support this movement.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your opinion by sending us an email at artr@ix.netcom.com, or by commenting to our new blog. (http://unified-view.blogspot.com/)

The Math of Customer UC: blog. (http://unified-view.blogspot.com/)

Read our exclusive articles below on hosted UC services for customer contact applications:

Online Customer Contacts: Online Self-service Needs Are Evolving

Converging Customer Self-services: What Technologies Need to Converge Between Online and Voice Self-Services?

Customer Voice Contacts: Smarter Call Center IP Telephony Routing

Stop Guessing! The Five Real Reasons For Migrating Your Call Center to IP

When "Push Comes to Shove" for UC Implementation

Copyright © 2006 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

December 29, 2006

When “Push Comes to Shove,” Priorities for Migrating to UC in 2007 Will Be Found in the Macro-productivity of Mobile User Communications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Almost ten years ago, we surveyed enterprise members of the old Electronic Messaging Association (Email) about their interest in “unified messaging” (UM) The majority of responses indicated that only 20-40% of their organizations, primarily traveling executives and “road warriors” (sales, field service) would benefit significantly from UM capabilities. Now, with everyone becoming more mobile, and UM maturing into “unified communications” (UC), that percentage is bound to increase. But how?

2006 will be remembered as the year that everyone in the telephony industry jumped on the moving train of “unified communications” (UC). This is causing business organizations, both small and large, to start thinking about moving to VoIP and IP telephony, but, perhaps more importantly, about converging their legacy business communications with the power of handheld, mobile devices. This will no longer be just about real-time voice communications between people, nor will it be only about intra-enterprise contacts. It also doesn’t mean that existing enterprise phone systems will be immediately replaced simply because there is something better available!

The ROI of business communications – “Macro-productivity” vs. “Micro-productivity”

The initial arguments for implementing VoIP, IP telephony, and unified messaging were founded on potential Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reductions, which are important for budgets, do little for business process improvements (BPI) and enterprise productivity. At best, TCO comes into play when making “greenfield” purchases or replacing end-of-life legacy (“brownfield”) technologies. But, if you listen to the new pitch from all the major technology providers that are now capitalizing on open IP telephony as being part of UC, they are touting the business payoffs that will come from increased “productivity,” for both individual users (“micro-productivity”) and for the enterprise through efficient group task performance (“macro-productivity”).

Micro-productivity for business communications means that individual users can save time in doing their jobs by accessing both information and people more flexibly and faster because of converged interfaces and interoperability between the various modalities of person-to-person contact. For the latter, users should be able to easily switch between asynchronous messaging (voice, text, video) to real-time IM, person-to-person voice and video calls, and multi-party voice and video conferencing. This capability becomes particularly time efficient when users have “multimodal” endpoint devices on their desktops or as mobile handheld devices (smartphones), and contact initiators can exploit presence management to determine recipient availability before wasting their time in failed real-time contact attempts.

How do enterprise business processes benefit? - Group Macro-productivity

For enterprise business payoff, however, the productivity objective is to achieve greater business process (task) performance by all involved individual users as a group (“macro-productivity”). This means that the more people involved in a business process that can realize micro-productivity through UC technologies, the greater the level of macro-productivity performance that can be achieved by the business process. So, the value of UC to the enterprise will be highly dependent upon both the role of individual users and the value of the business processes they participate in.

What this also says is that the value of UC will not be the same for every end user in the enterprise for micro-productivity. So, from an ROI perspective, UC applications will be “nice to have” for some people, but “must have” for others. Because UC also means “personalizing” dynamic control of communication access across different modalities, individual user needs and preferences will vary. So, a practical UC migration challenge facing every enterprise will be to prioritize UC implementation for the specific macro-productivity ROI of high value business processes and the individual needs of associated end users.

UC at the portable desktops vs. handheld devices

Nothing will bring UC issues into focus as much as the user interfaces that different endpoint devices provide. This is where personal mobility must be differentiated between portable (wired or wireless) desktop devices with a large screen and keyboard, vs. “always on” handheld devices that can be carried everywhere for immediate contact accessibility. The latter will have smaller screens and keyboards that will limit their use for applications that require heavy contextual information displays, e.g. customer support “screen pops.”

Mobile handheld devices are not only becoming multimodal by accommodating all forms of media (voice, text, graphics, video) in their form factors, but are also becoming platforms that support multiple operating systems (e.g., one for business applications, one for consumer applications), each with multiple application software clients. In effect, they are becoming the “always on” handheld equivalent of the general-purpose desktop PC, particularly effective for personalized mobility, and being able to interoperate with both enterprise and consumer application services. This a key factor for maximizing user adoption and realizing UC ROI, where device independence is an absolute necessity for interoperability with a variety of mobile devices carried by different kinds of end users.

Business Processes, SOA, And UC

While we tend to think of voice communications and real-time messaging as primarily “person-to-person” contacts, the reality is that business processes that need to deliver time-sensitive information to people also have a critical need for the flexibility of UC to make timely contacts with people. Whether it is a group of people that need notifications, a specific individual, or whoever is most qualified and available, business processes must be able to proactively initiate contacts and deliver information to people, rather than passively wait for a person to detect a situation and manually initiate appropriate contact attempts.

The people contacts for a business process don’t have to be only within an enterprise organization, but can include supply chain partners and individual customers. If urgent notification is a business process application requirement, then it is clear that mobile contact accessibility, along with desktop contacts, will provide a practical real-time contact solution through immediate voice or text message delivery. Such application contact may be tied to a “click to respond” automated process to accept application response inputs, display contextual information (“screen pops”), or initiate “instant” conferencing with other people, depending upon the user device available.

While Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has become all the rage for more efficiently developing new business applications by sharing and sharing and reusing software functional modules, UC application capabilities can be developed in the same way, not only for “person-to-person” contacts, but also for the application-initiated contact to people mentioned above. The UC applications will allow maximum flexibility in making real-time contacts with people when business process priorities demand it. With a SOA approach, both the business process applications and the UC contact capabilities will be buffered from specific user endpoint device dependencies and resulting delays because of “contact latency.”

Customer Satisfaction and Productivity

In case you haven’t noticed that the power of enterprise UC is becoming more focused on customer contact applications, take another look because that’s where real revenue-generating ROI comes from. As we indicated earlier, business process macro-productivity is dependent upon all participants in the process. So, if it is a customer situation that needs attention, there will be much benefit if the customer is in the UC productivity loop as well. Since consumers are becoming both more mobile and multimodal with personalized handheld smartphones and desktop PCs, there is no reason to keep treating them as a telephone-only, primarily inbound contact.

It should be painfully obvious that any customer contact situation will benefit as part of a macro-productivity approach that UC can provide. Whether it is closing the loop between internal staff members during an initial customer contact to achieve “first contact resolution,” or in minimizing the time to resolve a customer need on an “as soon as possible” basis and proactively notify them accordingly. This also includes self-service business process applications that enable authorized customers to access information directly and perform business transactions without waiting for staff assistance. Communication accessible customers will then become more “productive” for revenue generation by being more satisfied with the efficiency of their interaction experience in resolving their needs and thereby remaining potential revenue contributors to the enterprise.

Summary

Business processes include both automated business applications that process and monitor specific business activity information and the ability to communicate flexibly and efficiently with people involved with such activity, both inside and outside the organization. The former increasingly includes mobile and remote employees, while the latter includes increasingly mobile people in partner organizations and increasingly mobile customers with multimodal devices. What ties them all together to facilitate macro-productivity efficiencies and eliminate “human latency,” are direct access to business process applications and flexible, efficient, multimodal communication services.

While it has been traditional for enterprise organizations to provide and control communication services only for their own employees working on premise (CPE), the reality of macro-productivity is that supporting all end users that are involved with a business process, but are working off-campus or are outside the organization, will be needed to maximize the efficiency and payoff of high-value, time-sensitive task completion. All this is part of an “open,” converged approach to business process applications and mobile communications. Maybe this is why Cisco recently acquired Orative and Avaya bought Traverse.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your opinion by sending us an email at artr@ix.netcom.com, or by commenting to our new blog. (http://unified-view.blogspot.com/)

The Math of Customer UC: blog. (http://unified-view.blogspot.com/)

Read our exclusive articles below on hosted UC services for customer contact applications:

Online Customer Contacts: Online Self-service Needs Are Evolving

Converging Customer Self-services: What Technologies Need to Converge Between Online and Voice Self-Services?

Customer Voice Contacts: Smarter Call Center IP Telephony Routing

Stop Guessing! The Five Real Reasons For Migrating Your Call Center to IP