Beyond Unified Communications

After decades spent trying to simply keep the phones working, businesses are now faced with a mind boggling array of “Unified Communications” technologies. As Richard Pinnington, Nortel’s UK Enterprise Marketing Manager explains, by communications-enabling key business processes, companies of all sizes could dramatically improve business performance.

The mobile phone was revolutionary for many reasons, most of all because it did away with the rule that we had to be at our desks to receive a phone call. Since the start of the new decade, another revolution has been taking place.

All the networks that underpin the various ways we communicate are converging. Voice calls run via the PBX over your data network, rather than across separate networks. Mobile calls can move away from the mobile network operators into this environment too. And the whole lot can be integrated with the business applications, such as Microsoft Office, running on your PC’s. This is the world of ‘unified communications’.

Why unify your business communications?
Most businesses want to do things faster. They want to streamline business processes, use information more intelligently, find efficiencies and productivity gains and apply those to all functions of the business from design and project collaboration, manufacturing and logistics to front line selling and customer service.

Businesses also have to support an increasingly mobile workforce and ensure that productivity gains on site are equally extended to geographically dispersed employees. Some businesses are already extending these capabilities to allow employees to collaborate with a network of contacts outside of their own business, to use presence/IM capabilities to determine the availability of people in their wider network and the best means of contacting them at any moment.

Binding these things together is a set of technologies referred to as Unified Communications (UC). Enhancing employee productivity is the most obvious outcome: now that we can simply click to do that, or drag and drop to do this we save precious time that we get back to serve customers better and grow sales.

We are, in effect, changing the rules by making communications work in tune with the way we work - and not the other way around.

A further consideration is the reality that a new generation is entering the workforce. “Millennials” have grown up with the Internet and with social networking environments, using tools such as Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Twitter, Wikis and Blogs. They will enter the world of work expecting the tools and technologies they are used to using at home to at least be matched by those available in their place of work. It used to be the case that we would go to work to use the cool stuff, like a PC or a mobile, and that email was cool. The ‘millennials’ likely consider that email is a communications tool that old people use!

Whatever the reality, in future the sophistication or otherwise of your communications environment may well influence your ability to hire and retain the best talent, and impact general morale and productivity too.

Embedding communications into your business applications
UC is only the beginning, however. As employees become used to the concept of UC, and enjoy the everyday improvements it enables, companies are now exploring how they can push communications deeper into their business infrastructure by implementing systems & applications that are ‘communications-enabled’.

Nortel's Innovative Communications Alliance  (ICA) with Microsoft has taken this idea further than any other vendor, building UC directly into the Microsoft productivity applications used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. If an employee is collaborating on a document with co-workers, for example, their status is continually updated within Microsoft Word, Excel, and other applications – and they can be reached via voice, video, or instant messaging with just a click.

Would these process improvements positively impact your business?
Instead of waiting for an employee to initiate a form of communication, by communications-enabling business processes (CEBP) a company can now programme intelligence into key applications to detect and proactively respond to specific business events – automatically triggering the appropriate communications processes to handle those events.

What does that mean? Gartner has estimated that 85 percent of business processes are slowed down through human latency. If we can automate more activities, then the business runs more efficiently.

Consider the typical customer support call. A customer might phone for advice in resolving a technical issue they're having with an important but highly technical product. All your technical staff are in the field, but you need to help the customer immediately to keep him happy and to meet your required service level agreements.

In the past, you would probably have called the technician's mobile, waited for him to call back, tried another technician, and kept the customer on hold for a few minutes before apologetically offering to call him back. This is hardly efficient, but it's the best many companies can do because their support process is constrained by the limits of their technology.

What if the customer's call could kick off an entire string of events, instantly reaching the right people and setting up all necessary communications links? In a CEBP environment, the simple act of creating a trouble ticket would kick off a series of events. The system would:
• Query the HR database to build a list of technicians that have successfully completed training on the product in question
• Check ‘presence’ information for each technician to check whether they're available to take a call
• Use GPS information from each technician's mobile phone to rank them by who is closest to the customer's office
• Check the technicians' schedules to find out who will be available first
• Initiate a phone call, instant messaging session, email alert and/or videoconference with that technician that lets the customer service person explain the situation and confirm attendance at the customer premises
• Automatically confirm the visit with the customer

Each step requires a different form of communication and a separate effort by the customer service representative, who would normally have to juggle the phone and several different applications to complete each step. This translates into a considerable amount of time, energy and money spent chasing the right people, all the while trying to appear as a swan above the water in front of the customer. By transferring this effort to an automated system, companies can improve efficiency and boost customer satisfaction.

Other processes that could benefit with CEBP
• Streamlining the supply chain: in an environment where inventories are kept lean, you could configure a series of automatic alerts or initiate conference calls with key contacts up and down the supply chain should in the event of inventory shortages; using GPS information, a text message can be sent to a customer automatically when a delivery driver is within an agreed range of a customers house
• Improving resource utilisation in Healthcare: A patient can be discharged more quickly because the patient care application can connect all available authorising medical personnel, wherever they are.
• An insurance policy is approved more quickly because the insurance application allows the agent to initiate real-time communications with people who have reviewed the policy or are required to approve it.
• In Emergency Services, faster and more effective emergency response is provided because the first responder application recognises the availability and location of key resources.
• A brokerage team is better able to respond to the stock market dynamics through a communications-enabled brokerage application that orchestrated real-time collaboration triggered by a market event.

An industrial customer problem is resolved more quickly because the project management application scheduled the earliest possible conference call with all key available stakeholders and delivered all relevant information to them.

But how does CEBP work?
Conceptually, it's similar to service oriented architecture (SOA), a way of developing software that assembles complete applications from discrete parts called 'Web services'. Each Web service does one thing - for example, looking up details of a purchase order, printing an invoice, executing a bank transfer and transferring payment details into the company's financial system. Instead of building an Accounts Payable application from scratch, developers could just combine the four Web services and be ready to go.

CEBP does the same thing with communications services. Where each business application previously used application programming interfaces (APIs) to explicitly control the PBX, CEBP applications just say "I need to check the presence status of technician Joe Bloggs, then conference him into an instant messaging chat with this customer". The PBX handles all the details in the background. API’s are about minutiae, while CEBP is about results.

Nortel has a broad-based alliance with IBM, the world's biggest supplier of SOA solutions, to build on its expertise and deliver CEBP solutions that deliver real results for customers. Working together, the alliance will make the full range of communications services as flexible, portable, robust and accessible as SOA frameworks have done with business functions.
Because these solutions are totally based on open standards, they are easily accessible from any business application, regardless of vendor, using concepts that developers already understand and can integrate with their own applications. They may even be provided by third parties such as application vendors or telecommunications carriers, which are benefiting from Nortel's Agile Communication Environment  (ACE) initiative.

ACE enables carriers to develop a broad range of communications and infrastructure services, then give customers access to those services as and when they're needed. In this way, carriers can help customers quickly realize the ultimate goal of CEBP: that any business application can use any communications service to contact any person they need, when they are needed, wherever they are.

CEBP can drive significant process changes in any business. Instead of worrying about how they will reach people, staff take communications for granted – and benefit from intelligent systems that create better business processes, facilitating new social interactions and greater productivity. Long-entrenched workflows can be completely rewritten to capitalize upon communities of efficiency – malleable alliances of workers that group and regroup to solve business problems as they emerge.

The result? A flexible, results-focused organisation with employees that can get on with getting the job done. You may have thought mobile phones were a big step back then, but CEBP promises equally big changes in the way business applications work. Once CEBP takes hold, you'll be amazed where it takes you.

Adapted from an article by Mitch Radomir, Enterprise Solutions Marketing, Nortel Asia