BY ROBERT HASHEMIAN

Basically, computer-telephony integration (CTI) presents you with a tradeoff. On the upside, CTI lets you assume control of your telecommunications destiny. On the downside, CTI requires that you provide the kind of reliability and responsiveness telecommunications users take for granted. Sounds like work? Well, it is. But CTI is coming whether you like it or not. You might as well be ready. With some extra effort, you can assemble and maintain an environment conducive to CTI, and you’ll be in a position to take advantage of everything CTI has to offer.

FACE THE FACTS: WE’VE HAD IT DEAD EASY
In the computer world, we’ve all contended with unruly applications, balky networks, and crashed servers. But we’re seldom discouraged. Whatever the inconvenience, we eventually put things right. Of course, users may grumble when the network is down. At the same time, however, most users recognize that computers make our lives easier and more productive. So, they’re usually more than willing to forgive the computer (and the MIS department).

In the telecom world, however, users don’t regard service interruptions as petty nuisances. Users demand 100 percent uptime. Anything less, and you’ve got an emergency. People screaming for blood. (Your blood.) Small wonder, then, that the telecom world delivers virtually uninterrupted service, day after day, year after year.

The point is, we’ve made our lives a lot easier by leaving telecommunications to the phone companies. In essence, we say, “Let the phone companies deal with user demands for 100 percent uptime. We’ll stay over here in the computer world, where users are reasonable!”

THE PRICE WE’VE PAID
Of course, taking the easy way out always has a price. And often the price is much higher than we might have suspected. The question, then, is this: What price have we paid for leaving telecommunications to the phone companies? The answer: They’ve treated us like children, shutting us out of the arcane telecom world, leaving us with minimal control over our telecommunications systems. In short, we’ve been penalized with ignorance and powerlessness. (I need hardly add that these qualities do little to intimidate the phone companies.)

A LESS COSTLY ALTERNATIVE
If the problem is ignorance and powerlessness, the solution is CTI. By marrying the computer and the telephone, CTI lets users define their own telecommunications services. CTI even lets users control the telephone system itself.

By taking advantage of a single piece of equipment at the desktop (I’m speaking virtually here), users can do their jobs more effectively. For example, unified messaging allows us to keep track of all sorts of messages from one source. Conferencing standards give us audio and video capability to facilitate workgroup activities. Telephony standards provide us with call control. And remote access products keep us connected no matter where we are.

I must point out, however, that all these wonderful CTI capabilities depend on the right supporting environment. For example, if your infrastructure isn’t up to scratch, you’ll need to upgrade it. (CTI may be less costly than wallowing in ignorance, but it’s not free, either.)

POTENTIAL PITFALLS
If you doubt preparing for CTI is a serious undertaking, consider these perennial challenges: Integrating computers with telephones is inherently risky if you use ordinary PCs. The fact is, ordinary PCs fail too often for us to trust them with our telecommunications. Consider these “ordinary” events: Crashed hard drives. Fried motherboards. The BSOD (Blue/Black Screen Of Death). We can take these in stride within the computer world, but such failures can be catastrophic in the CTI world. They would cripple telephone service.

Telephone service operates in a realtime realm, where users expect quick responses. The telephone set rings as soon as a call comes in, and the parties to the call can begin talking without any delays or interruptions. And, with a phone, call conferencing (once learned) is a quick push of the button.

Computers, however, aren’t always so responsive. We’ve all experienced slow networks, sluggish application response, and interrupted sessions. These problems aren’t very serious if you’re using a word processor or downloading e-mail; however, if you’re trying to use the phone, such problems make for frustrating delays.

Applications are never totally bugfree. Eventually, under specific conditions, even the most inconspicuous bug can rear its ugly head and crash your application. Other application problems include virus attacks, incompatibilities with the operating system, and incompatibilities among applications that need to run simultaneously. Such problems can plague a CTI solution. Since CTI involves adding an application layer over telephone service, any CTIenabled system is susceptible to the same weaknesses that plague other software applications.

Unsophisticated users may misuse CTI applications. Many users still are not savvy enough with many applications to make use of their many productive features. Even worse, some users may corrupt, delete, or relocate data, thus rendering their computers or their applications unusable. Such mishaps cannot happen in the traditional telephone world since the users have little direct control over telephone services, but CTI will change all that. CTI will bring the user dangerously close to telephony services.

We’ve encountered all of these problems in our own lab. In fact, we could present you with quite a long list of mishaps, only we fear we might discourage you. Still, we should list a few of them, just to give you a sense of what can go wrong. Here goes:

• Someone accidentally deleted the TAPI files on our system, a thoughtless act that disabled our call control application.
• A certain fax software program run ning on Windows NT would fail whenever we faxed an Acrobat file.
• Network congestion caused delays on all calls over our telephony gate ways. The culprit? An application on another node.
• Our call control application took an eternity to pop up on an incoming call because we were loading a large application while calls were arriving.
• We lost our connection to our Internet unified messaging service because our Internet connection died. We could go on, but you probably get the picture by now.

AVOIDING THE PITFALLS
Don’t suppose that I point out pitfalls because I’m anti-CTI. I work for CTI magazine, after all. My problem with CTI is that while we may implement it with good intentions, we frequently neglect up-front planning. Basically, we fail to provide an appropriate support environment.

Since users demand 100 percent uptime, whoever implements a CTI system must consider every possible system failure. Further, the implementor must devise ways to prevent the failures. Nothing short of comprehensive design and implementation is acceptable when you deploy CTI. So, here are my suggestions to make your CTI project a success from the start:

• Figure out why you need CTI. Remember that the real reason behind implementing CTI is to help the bottom line, not just to have a cool gadget.
• Make sure that the management and the future users understand the need to migrate to CTI. Win their support. For management, you may need to perform plenty of accounting to show the ROI (return on investment). For users, you may need to stage demonstrations to prove usability.
• Design the entire system in advance. Consider how telephony and the computer systems will interface at the server and at the client levels to provide for maximum productivity while maintaining maximum uptime.
• Make sure you implement a failsafe design. Consider UPS backups, RAID systems, and even redundant servers for your CTI environment. When it comes to CTI equipment, do not cut corners. Choose the best and the most reliable equipment. Also, consider the speed of your computers and your network equipment. You may need to add switches to your network to speed it up at certain segments. Slow computers and networks could prove disastrous when call volumes climb.
• Think about maintenance and upgrade paths. Capacity planning is one of the most important steps you can take to save yourself headaches down the road.
• Provide comprehensive training for yourself and for the users. The more sophisticated you are, the faster you can troubleshoot a problem. The more sophisticated the users are, the greater the chances they’ll actually use the productivity-enhancing features of CTI. (You’ll also get a bonus: Your support staff will receive fewer calls.)
• Break up the CTI conversion task into multiple steps. This approach allows you to fully test each step before going to production. Also, a staged implementation goes down easier with users. That is, you could overwhelm users if you were to overhaul the entire system at once.
• Be prepared to roll back to the older system in case things do not go as planned. You should keep the old system alive for at least 3 months before scrapping it, just in case.
• Consider all your options when you purchase CTI products. Unfortunately, CTI products are expensive, so choose correctly the first time, and avoid costly mistakes. Evaluate CTI products from the standpoints of usability, features, adherence to standards, and scalability. Although CTI is a young field, it is densely populated with vendors competing for your business.

CONCLUSION
All the hype about CTI is true, by and large. But the hype is only half the story. Yes, with CTI you can take control of your telecommunications, you can implement productivityenhancing applications, you can create services well beyond what anyone would have dared imagine just a couple of years ago. There is one catch, however. You have to accept responsibility for delivering nearly 100 percent uptime as well as real-time responsiveness. While formidable, these tasks are not insurmountable. Just be prepared. Do the work. Then, when you become a CTI star, people will marvel at your overnight success. Of course, success isn’t as easy as the casual observer may imagine. But we know better. Drop me a line, and let me know how you are coming along with your CTI success story.

Robert Vahid Hashemian is a technology editor for CTI magazine. He welcomes reader responses to this column.

Telephone companies, like the Greyhound bus company, have a “leave the driving to us” philosophy. And we’ve gone along with it. We’ve relied on the phone companies to provide our telecommunications services, and to shield us from telecommunications’ complexities. That’s OK, except that we’ve limited ourselves to whatever options the phone companies have seen fit to give us. In fact, our telecommunications options have been as limited as the transportation options a bus line could provide. (If everyone doesn’t want it, no one gets it!)

These limitations are disappearing now that we have CTI, the telecommunications equivalent of having your own car. To take the analogy one step further, we’d like to discuss the telecommunications equivalent of Driver’s Ed. We’re talking, of course, about CTI EXPO, which will showcase one of the world’s largest congregations of CTI equipment and service vendors. At CTI EXPO, many CTI products will be on-hand for your inspection. In addition, you’ll have the chance to talk face-to-face with industry experts to get the most up-todate information about CTI technologies.

Come to CTI EXPO, May 19-22 in Baltimore, MD, and learn the rules of the road! For more information, please visit our Web site at www.ctiexpo.com