Unified-View (Part 2)

By Art Rosenberg

Back | (Part 2)

We see the handwriting is on the wall for enterprise organizations to enable user accessibility management to personalize, consolidate and control all forms of person-to-person communication access, including real-time voice, video and all flavors of real-time and asynchronous messaging. It must be more than the current “buddy list” approach of instant messaging that assumes automatically providing the same recipient status information and IM access only to all pre-defined “buddies” who are online to the Internet. Contact initiators must be able to easily move among the various modalities of communication (asynchronous messages, instant messaging, voice conversations), depending on the dynamic circumstances of the recipients. 

That is the missing cross-network layer that can be enabled by IP networking which will make person-to-person communications more efficient and manageable, not just for contact recipients, but selectively for a variety of voice callers, IM initiators, information alerts and any form of real-time contact initiation.

INTELLIGENT, TWO-WAY VS. "BLIND" PERSON-TO-PERSON CONTACTS
We have long lived with “blind” communication contact initiations including unsuccessful telephone call attempts and e-mail and voice mail messages that get responded to too late or not at all. The negative effect of such failed contact attempts is three-fold:

• First, contact initiators waste a lot their personal time in making the attempts;

• Two, other people’s time will be wasted because of unsuccessful contacts; and

• Three, there is the bottom-line risk of missing a business-related “deadline” because of excessive delay in completing time-sensitive contacts.

All of the above factors impact people “productivity.” That’s beginning to be the new ROI target for enterprise organizations trying to cost-justify new communications technologies. However, such benefits are still considered “soft” because they don’t directly reduce costs and because they are difficult to quantify. The fact that timely and effective communications can minimize penalties for missing deadlines or increase revenue generation rates seems to be lost on the bean counters. 

Because we are really talking about personal communications accessibility and responsiveness, we see an opportunity for a new accessibility management layer not only to enable faster and more flexible person-to-person communications, but also to provide new activity data metrics for quantifying the effectiveness of such communication activities.

THE REAL-TIME "PERSONAL CONTACT MANAGER"
We need a better label for this new converged communications server, because current presence management and instant messaging are mere subsets of what we are talking about. Some technology providers use terms like “personal assistant,” “one-number services,” etc., to describe their call-screening software offerings, all focused on the benefits to the user for managing incoming contacts. Even the term “availability management” smacks of concern only for the contact recipient, because when it comes to a contact initiator, by definition they are really always available at that moment in time!

We see this new server function as supporting an end user’s needs both as a contact initiator and a contact recipient, and must be able to interoperate on an end-to-end, cross-network basis with similar servers representing other end users within other enterprise organizations or consumers using a carrier-based service. Within an enterprise organization, this server can be centralized through IP connectivity and service all enterprise users communicating internally or with external contacts.   

The personal contact manager will have to take responsibility for the following functions:

• Enable the contact initiator to identify the person to be contacted. This may be through personal address books, in a message, embedded contact links in a document, a differentiated  “buddy list,” or through a manual name/address entry (voice or text).

• Indicate preferred medium of communication. This may be implicit because of step 1 above, or it may be different. Initiating a voice call from a visual text message or document should be the same as using speech input to initiate the same kind of contact.

• Initiate accessibility negotiations. This is where the server will determine the current availability and modality of the contact recipient for a real-time connection. SIP-based connectivity will provide a means for determining recipient device capabilities. This may be done when the recipient is also serviced by the same accessibility server or by making contact through a network gateway with a remote server representing the recipient. Either way, the contact attempt will require identity authentication from the recipient to determine the modality of the contact. The contact recipient may require immediate notification of the contact attempt for manual approval when the pre-established screening rules don’t apply or if a known or authorized contact initiator requests an override of such rules. 

• Provide feedback about contact options to the initiator. This is a key consideration for dynamic multi-modal communications, where the contact initiator is given practical feedback about the recipient’s real-time availability and modality (voice, text), as well as non-real-time (messaging) alternatives to a real-time connection. If an asynchronous messaging mode is selected by the contact initiator, the message may still be classified as “urgent” to insure immediate notification and delivery through instant messaging.

1. Notification of message delivery/non-delivery. One of the failings about asynchronous messaging is that the originator doesn’t always know when the message was picked up or if it hasn’t been picked up. Furthermore, in time-sensitive situations such information must be provided as an immediate notification. Immediate notification may easily be handled as an instant message instead of an asynchronous message delivery or paging alert.    

• Coordinate identity management of expected contact initiators. The “buddy list” concept needs to be expanded to dynamically recognize contacts who are temporarily “expected,” such as people who have been recently sent an e-mail or a voice mail message and a real-time response is expected. This kind of information may be derived from integration with messaging server activities.

• Manage recipient accessibility rules. The screening of real-time contacts and  notification messages will be dictated to some extent by personalized pre-set rules created by the users. The personal accessibility server may provide the user interface for creating and managing such rules.

• Contact activity logging and recording. A key ingredient to managing communications activities within the enterprise will include the ability to track all end-to-end contact attempts and results, whether real-time or not. There are, however, privacy issues that will conflict with the needs of enterprise management for security and operational efficiency. DYS Analytics offers Collaboration CONTROL! that collects performance and usage data for real-time communication contacts that will be helpful for managing enterprise resources and operations. 

There are a number of technology products to manage instant messaging activities within an enterprise environment, particularly for financial services markets. These include familiar IM products from service providers like AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo that have targeted enterprise needs. Other products in this space include IBM/Lotus’ Sametime, Envoke from Asynchrony Solutions, Hub IM from Communicator, IM Manager from IMLogic, and Enterprise IM from Jabber. However, they are focused primarily on instant text messaging and do not cover the converged communications waterfront as discussed above. Leading telecommunications providers such as Avaya, Siemens and Nortel Networks are also including SIP-based technology for “personal assistant” services for call management. Perhaps these will all eventually evolve into our vision of truly converged and manageable communications for users within the enterprise. 

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
How should personalized multi-modal contact availability be managed in the enterprise? How will it integrate with wireless carrier services (Wi-Fi, 3G)? Where will the personalized, differentiated, multi-modal “Buddy Lists” be maintained? What kind of privacy considerations will be required for personalized “communication applications?” What role will current enterprise technology managers have in supporting individual user needs for converged communications management?

In a future column, David Zimmer will write about how the address book/enterprise directory/global directory functions will be used to support selective contact permissions and "allowed communicators" through “differentiated buddy lists."

Let us know your thoughts by sending your comments to [email protected]. You can also participate in our forums.

ENTERPRISE SURVEY OF CONVERGED COMMUNICATIONS MIGRATION
The Unified-View has started a comprehensive survey initiative to track the migration of enterprise organizations towards converged communications management. The ongoing survey is accessible through CommWeb and is open to enterprise technology managers responsible for current telephone or messaging communications and their migration to a converged network infrastructure and multi-modal communication devices.

Participants in this study will be rewarded with up-to-date perspective reports of how enterprise organizations are selectively migrating from their current communication technologies to support various user needs for enterprise-wide mobility and multi-modal communications.

To participate in this survey now, go to: http://cmp.inquisiteasp.com/surveys/e42wy8 and be sure to type in “TMC” as your Group Identification Code on the first page.

UNIFIED VIEW APPEARANCES

IAMP Annual Conference, Scottsdale, AZ, October 19-23, 2003
The Unified-View will be keynoting the annual conference of the International Association of Messaging Professionals (IAMP), an independent group of enterprise communication managers who are focusing on the challenges of migrating legacy telecommunications and messaging towards converged, multi-modal communications, including new “communication security” requirements for the enterprise. The impact of convergence on security issues such as communication service disruption, theft of service, and privacy violations will be discussed from both a technology provider and enterprise perspective.

In conjunction with this conference, IAMP commissioned the Unified-View to survey its membership regarding their organizations’ perspectives and progress towards implementing and supporting unified communications technologies. The initial results of this study will be presented and discussed at the conference, which will take place in Scottsdale, AZ, on October 19-23, 2003.

This year’s conference is open to IAMP members, current Avaya customers, and any organization that is considering the acquisition of Avaya technology. For further details, go to the IAMP conference Web site. 

Avaya Forum, Barcelona, Spain, October 21-24, 2003
The Unified-View will be discussing the future of traditional telecommunications management with Avaya’s EMEA customers, partners, and prospects, including additional ongoing survey data perspectives of enterprise migrations towards converged communications.

New White Paper
Don’t forget to pull down your free copy of our latest white paper, “Migrating to Enterprise-wide Communications: The Branch Office Dilemma,” on enterprise-wide communication applications in a distributed enterprise. Simply go to our Web site – www.unified-view.com, fill out the form, and download the paper.

Art Rosenberg and David Zimmer are veterans of the computer and communications industry and formed The Unified-View to provide strategic consulting to technology and service providers, as well as to enterprise organizations, in migrating towards converged wired and wireless unified communications. They focus on practical user requirements, implementation issues, and new benefits of multi-modal communication technologies for individual end users, both as consumers and as members of enterprise working groups. The latter includes identifying new responsibilities for enterprise communications management to support changing operational usage needs most cost-effectively.

Considered to be objective industry thought leaders, Art Rosenberg and David Zimmer have been publishing their highly-acclaimed syndicated column on unified messaging and unified communications for over four years to a worldwide audience of consultancies, technology providers, service providers, and enterprise technology managers. Both principals are popular speakers at leading technology conferences and organized the first programs in the industry focused on the subject of unified messaging/communications. The Unified-View's website (www.unified-view.com) is also considered to be a leading source for information on the evolution of unified communications.

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