Bridging The Gap Between UC-U and UC-B - UC-G?
The recent UC Summit that was 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, that I and my UC Strategies colleagues published earlier this year.
While both perspectives are valid and important, there is a gap between the two. Because most business processes 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 communicate as quickly and flexibly as possible, either as as contact initiators or contact recipients/respondents, so that there is no unnecessary delay in the process as a whole. If a key decision maker or action taker should be delayed in communicating, the whole process will consequently suffer a delay. So the impact of personal productivity (UC-U) can also impact (UC-B).
I recognized this years ago when first looking at the need for UC. I suggested 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 specific individual, then such an individual has to maximize their communication accessibility through UC flexibility for the benefit of the group and the business process.
“Group productivity” or “UC-G” can be described as the flexible accessibility 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 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 the situation. 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, 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.
Thanks, Art, for the dialog on the “types” of Unified Communications. However, I don’t think there is a need for a third type, as suggested with UC-G. In the dialog leading up the the UC Summit presentation that you reference, your points were actively discussed before settling on just the two types, for simplicity’s sake.
My analysis, with which others have concurred, is that if you begin to track the performance of a group in terms of business outcomes, you have transitioned to UC-Business Process (optimization). Of course, these UC-B solutions will take advantage of as much UC-U functionality as is appropriate, but it’s not necessary to distinguish the need for an individual to be more or less responsive when acting in a group. In fact, if the group includes alternate equivalent resources, as you mention, it is actually less important that the individual be responsive, since they are not the only resource that can keep the process moving.
Confirming the importance of your examples, the need for clinical care providers to respond promptly to a life-threatening state is a well understood process in most Hospitals, often referenced by code names (Blue, Red, etc.) and process names (e.g. Rapid Response Team). In those cases, UC-B is ideal, since it can examine the on-duty status, proximity and availability of the needed skills (a pre-defined panel based on the type of crisis) and alert those people with pagers, mobile wireless devices, or other UC methods. It is the integration to the business process that makes the difference here, building on presence, location, and directory techologies and using only one or two appropriate notification devices, much more than the breadth of the UC tool set.
My conclusion is that while UC-G does look like a unique spot, it is really a specific case of UC-B that incorporates elements of UC-U and UC-B, so I think of UC-G as more of a UC application type (e.g. Resource Identification for Problem Resolution or Collaboration Acceleration) as described in this BCR Magazine article: http://www.unicommconsulting.com/library/BCR_June_2007_UC_Applications.pdf.
Thanks, again, for the dialog. I’ll watch for your further commentary.
Marty,
You hit the nail on the head by identifying the business process as the appropriate way to manage and track business contacts and responses with people, even when there is only a single individual involved. Such tracking analysis should reveal what obstacles are causing delays, particularly with asynchronous messaging, which could then lead to eliminating or avoiding such obstacles in some way. As all users start becoming more mobile and using multimodal “smart-phones,” we might start sending SMS notification messages instead of just emails, where text can be retrieved by voice when necessary by a mobile user.
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