The bottom line payoff for UC-based business communications has been widely promoted as optimizing business process performance through communications efficiency and flexibility or “UC-B.” While there are also direct benefits to individual end users (UC-U) in terms of personal productivity, the reality is that the more you can automate and the less you need to depend on people to be be part of a business process, the more efficient the process will be. (In the real world, though, we can’t automate everything all the time!)

With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise action-takers, and automated business applications will be increasing significantly. What that means is that both automated self-service applications and access to live assistance can be initiated by either a business process or by a customer, and the real-time medium of communication can selectively be combinations of voice conversations, “Push-to-talk” voice message exchange, online interactions, or text messaging (IM, SMS). (Social networking might also be part of the game.)

The “Apps Store” concept of wireless service providers can be extended to enterprise portals to facilitate consumer access to various mobile customer applications, while at the enterprise end, the automated business process can monitor the status of  application metrics and proactively initiate a personalized customer contact with a choice of user interfaces based on accessibility (device, Presence status) or user preference. I see CEBP getting the most mileage out of mobile online applications and proactive “process-to-person” multimodal notifications, (authorized, of course), both coupled with “click-for assistance” (choice of IM or voice connection). Such contacts will be more “intelligent” and efficient because they will be contextually initiated, based on the information source used by the customer for contact initiation or the business application that exploits CEBP. It won’t be just their identity as a caller or the location they call from.

If we are looking at UC-B as the major justification for implementing UC, we obviously must highlight customer contacts and interactions as a key target for UC flexibility. Accordingly, as consumer adoption of personalized mobile smartphones increases, the old enterprise voice-based call center game has to change as well.

Hello proactive “IVVR” applications! (Interactive Voice/-Visual Response)

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
2 Comments »

Gartner Research has long been a leader in evaluating new computer-based technologies, and I personally know several of the researchers who write about business communications. Bern Elliot, Vice President of Research at Gartner, did a pretty good job in the middle of last year of putting UC technologies into an enterprise business perspective for their “Magic Quadrant” for Unified-Communications, 2007.

In a way, identifying who’s doing what in the UC industry is a little premature, because, until the new technologies are really finished or legacy technology is really ready to be replaced, UC has to be viewed as “a migratory work in progress.” However, it is important to track technology developments, products, and services so that IT will be ready to selectively deliver new UC capabilities whenever required. Gartner rightly confirms the following key points about UC value and approaches to implementation:

• What the UC Magic Quadrant 2007 report highlights, is the shift to software rather than premise-based hardware for UC application servers, as well as for endpoint device client software flexibility at the desktop and for personalized mobile device independence. This sets the stage for who the UC technology suppliers will be.

• The biggest value of UC capabilities, in general (not necessarily a particular application or infrastructure component of UC) is the “ability to reduce ‘human latency’” in business processes. Right there is the biggest challenge for enterprise UC planning; where, why, and for whom will UC applications really be important?

• Gartner recommends that organizations start doing the planning “homework” to answer the above-mentioned questions, i.e., identify the important users, what they are doing now, and start testing UC solutions for those types of users.

• Gartner claims to have coined the term “Communications Enabled Business Processes” or “CEBP”), now heavily adopted by Avaya) to describe what I have frequently talked about where automated applications can proactively can now act as efficient contact initiators to people. This can exploiting the flexibility of UC to further minimize the inefficiencies of traditional consumer-oriented, person-to-person communications..

New Comments From Gartner – “Business UC”

Bern Elliot added some additional useful perceptions about UC in a new Network World article, “Understanding the Value of Unified Comms.” In addition to repeating his prior statement about what UC is and the main value of reducing “human latency,” Elliot further identified “three functional areas” of what I would call “Business UC” (as opposed to “Consumer UC” which gets into entertainment.)

These are

1. “Personal UC” – which enables individuals to more easily and efficiently contact other individual (“Person-to-Person”). We have described that kind of productivity value as being a “micro-productivity” metric.

2. “Work-Group UC” – This is where UC is exploited to make teams of people more efficient and effective in their “collaborative” efforts on task performance as a group. This gets the job done to produce what we have described as a “macro-productivity” metric, which has more direct payoff to the organization, rather than just to the individuals.

3. “Enterprise UC” is new perspective for 2 above, but is based on proactive, business process application activities that exploit “CEBP” functionality to initiate and “orchestrate” faster and more effective contacts between people. By putting a business process work flow application “in charge” of notifying and coordinating contacts between people, it will be possible to also track the time-to-resolution of a problem, or completion of a task.

The emphasis on communicating flexibly efficiently with people, regardless of who the initiator is and regardless of the recipients, can maximize the success of any business task performance. Conversely, the failure of any key stakeholder to be able to initiate or receive a time critical contact, can impact the completion of any task.

Of course, the article reiterates the problem of what providers will supply what UC technologies, mentioned last year. There will be a lot of overlap, mix-and-match best-of-breed, and services vs. products. However, the bottom line message is to “pick your poison” after you do your homework!

Comment? Send me an email at artr@ix.netcom.com

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
1 Comment »

I’m having lots of discussions with the Avaya folks about Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) while in Boston at the Avaya Analyst Conference, and I’m finally starting to see why they’re differentiating CEBP from Unified Communications. I originally disagreed with Avaya about separating out CEBP from UC, since I (and my UCStrategies.com colleagues) believe that business process integration is a key part of UC and its value proposition. That being said, CEBP (the way Avaya defines it) is indeed different from UC. While UC is generally person triggered (an individual or worker initiates the communication), CEBP is event triggered (a business process-related event initiates the communication). The event could be an inventory shortage, a stock price change by a specific percentage, a manufacturing malfunction, a shipment delay, etc.

I’m thinking that instead of calling it CEBP, it should be called Automatic CEBP (ACEBP), since the key is to have the events automatically trigger the communications related to the business process. Rather than having an individual identify a problem or situation and initiate a phone call, conference call, web conference, etc., a specific event automatically generates the notification and communication with the appropriate parties. This may or may not include presence and UC capabilities.

So this really comes down to semantics – CEBP, the way it’s defined by Avaya and others, is indeed different and separate from UC. I still have some problems with the term Communication-Enabled Business Process since Unified Communications is optimized when comm-enabling business processes and applications. The difference is that CEBP does this automatically based on an event trigger.

I’ll be having lots more conversations with Avaya about CEBP and UC over the next couple days, so stay tuned.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
10 Comments »