Posted by ccstrategy on September 1st, 2011
This article explores how organisations can radically improve productivity and effectiveness through deployment of ‘Multi-dimensional Presence’ as part of their Unified Communications strategy.
Many organisations are deploying Instant Messaging to improve communications within and beyond the enterprise. Instant Messaging is one of the first tangible benefits of deploying a Unified Communications solution. It allows users to check the availability of colleagues and partners, chat and collaborate electronically. In many cases they can share files, share screens and call other users. Underpinning all Instant Messaging systems is what is known as ‘Presence’ – technology that tracks individuals’ availability. An individual may be ‘Available’, ‘Away’ or ‘Busy’ – this is their Presence State. If someone is ‘Away’ then you know they aren’t available, if someone is ‘Available’ then a tentative ‘Can you talk?’ message will determine if they are happy to be disturbed.
Instant Messaging is a great personal productivity tool. But ‘Presence’ can have a much more significant impact on an organisation’s business. Presence also opens up huge opportunities for improving the way an Enterprise operates. New technologies are emerging which will allow Presence to be integrated into business processes and drive enterprise productivity. To enable this to take place Presence needs to become Multi-Dimensional.
The Instant Messaging scenario is an example of one-dimensional presence. Someone is ‘Available’, ‘Away’ or ‘Busy’, and this will determine their availability to communicate. This is fine for one-to-one communication – when you already know who you want to talk to, and simply wish to contact them as quickly as possible. However, for an organisation to build processes around presence we need to add some additional dimensions.
One such dimension would be skill-set. A customer has called an organisation’s call centre, and the call centre agent needs to find a second-line expert in a particular product. They need someone who is both ‘Available’ and has a particular skill. A multi-dimensional presence solution would help identify someone based on these two criteria, so the call can be transferred. This if far better than asking the caller to call another number, or logging a call, with a promise of a call back at some point in the future. The customer will be better served, and the organisation’s processes more streamlined and efficient. Take this a step further, and assume some level of ‘self-service’ when the caller makes contact with the organisation, and the call could be routed to an available expert without a call centre agent’s involvement.
Another, potentially more useful dimension would be geographic location. An organisation needs to despatch a member of staff to a particular location – urgently. This is a requirement in many organisations with mobile workforces – both private and public sector. Often new assignments will be identified during the day and priorities will change. Imagine that the organisation has implemented a Presence solution that would enable them to perform a real-time check on availability, skill-set and location, in order to best allocate assignments. This could radically improve task management processes, improve reactivity and increase productivity in an organisation.
There are many other dimensions that can be added in addition to skill-set and geographic location. Predicted availability, based on a user’s calendar or presence history may be important. Or their seniority within an organisation, if escalation is required. Or previous experience of working on a particular assignment or with a particular customer. The more dimensions that can be built into a Presence solution, the more radical can be its impact on the organisation’s operation.
Call Centres were mentioned in an earlier example. Call Centres have received incredible focus in terms of their productivity and processes over the years. They rely on sophisticated software (including Automatic Call Distribution, Outbound Diallers and Workforce Management) to optimise their productivity. Call centres rely on knowing the availability (Presence) of their agents, and their skill-sets. Agents are allocated to skill-groups and their tasks (receiving and making calls) are automatically assigned and rigorously monitored. But the finely tuned processes developed in call centres are largely restricted to a specific group of workers dedicated to front-line interface with customers. Correctly deployed, a multi-dimensional Presence solution can allow an organisation to extend the call centre concepts across the whole organisation. With multi-dimensional Presence, the entire organisation becomes a part of that customer-facing team.
This doesn’t mean that the entire workforce is now tied to a desk and phone. Quite the opposite, it means that the organisation can reorganise so there is not such a strict delineation between front-line customer-facing personnel and the rest of the organisation. When ‘available’ individuals can be assigned tasks based on the many factors mentioned earlier: role, skill, location etc. And extending workforce management techniques to the wider enterprise can allow people to switch between ‘off-line’ proactive work to ‘on-line’ reactive activity as workloads dictate.
As previously mentioned, Presence is usually introduced as part of a Unified Communications deployment. This opens up the opportunity to link the entire organisation together into a single, multi-media communications environment, allowing calls, emails, faxes and messages to be transmitted seamlessly from one person or one department to another. Presence has a crucial part to play in the workflow of any organisation.
As organisations seek to reduce their environmental impact they are increasingly open to full-time or part-time home-working by their employees. This is facilitated by implementing a Unified Communications platform, allowing more flexible work arrangements whereby a worker can be on-line, and available to the organisation, whether at the office, at home, or on the road.
The utilisation of multi-dimensional presence doesn’t just apply to calls; it applies to all time-critical tasks. A health worker may be assigned the task of visiting a sick patient, a maintenance worker may be assigned to undertake a repair, a sales representative may be assigned to visit a customer. Whether office-based or mobile, knowing a worker’s Presence (in this wider sense) allows them to be better utilised.
Of course, all organisations are different. They have different requirements, and different systems and processes in place. So the way that they implement a multi-dimensional Presence solution will vary. But there are some common components that will be utilised:
- A Presence engine. This may be an existing Unified Communications platform that includes Presence states, such as Microsoft’s OCS, Cisco’s Unified Presence Server or Avaya’s OneX.
- An aggregation service, to gather information from multiple sources to create a complete, multi-dimensional view of presence.
- A task or call management solution – for allocating tasks and calls based on presence information. This may be an existing call distribution of workflow management solution, or a bespoke business application.
- A front-end, or more likely multiple front-ends, to allow presence information to be presented. This may include IM clients and bespoke web and client applications.
- Where mobile workers are involved, a mobile device equipped to collect and transmit geographic location – based on either mobile cell or GPS technology. This device can also be used to facilitate two-way communications with mobile workers – advising them of allocated tasks, and allowing them to update the status of such tasks.
- System interfaces and integration – ensuring real-time, multi-dimensional presence information is available to the users and systems requiring it. A multi-dimensional Presence solution does not usually replace existing business systems – it enables them to operate more effectively through access to improved real-time information.
Whilst the potential of multi-dimensional Presence, embedded into organisations’ business processes is enormous, most organisations will take an incremental approach to deploying it. The steps will vary from one organisation to another – but are likely to start with the implementation of a Unified Communications platform and Instant messaging solution. The next step is to start adding additional dimensions that are relevant to the organisation, and opening the aggregated information up to users and systems. Business processes can then be re-engineered to realise true productivity and reactivity benefits across the entire organisation.
This article started by extolling the virtues of Instant Messaging, under-pinned by a one-dimensional view of users’ presence. But the true potential of Presence technology lies with its integration deep into organisations’ business processes.
Posted by ccstrategy on September 1st, 2011
Do you have an over-reliance on populist models?
Several models exist for planning mobility around broad categories of mobile worker. While useful, these models are being overused, placing emphasis on the wrong aspects of mobility without deep consideration of the processes and applications being addressed.
The basic tenet appears to be “build it and they will come”. That’s fine if you are building a field of dreams, but not so good if you are spending $1.5 million on a new IT architecture. Instead, strategic plans for mobility should consider that different workers will use different applications at different times for different purposes. Planning for mobile collaboration must start with a thorough understanding of staff functions, their information and application needs, and then apply these information needs and applications to categories of mobile usage, not users.
Over the past 24 months, mobility has become a major issue for CIOs and CEOs, especially in the utilities, mining, logistics and construction sectors. The drivers are many and varied, but at the heart of the issue is the need to enrich the ability of an organisation to more fully utilise human capital in a very tight labour market.
The problem with overly simplistic models
During the past year, IBRS has reviewed mobility strategies from a myriad of different companies. While all differ in terms of scope, many are strikingly similar in terms of their general goals. Unfortunately, many of the reviewed strategy documents suffer from the overreliance of abstract models for mobility. These models set up categories of mobile worker (for example, alert, email, power user). Some also claim that workers can be mapped on a sliding scale of different aspects.
While useful to gaining a framework for discussion, these models all suffer from a single, terminal flaw: they assume that workers are static (rarely move out of a specific mobile network environment) and mono-modal (have a single job function or job functions that all require the same type of mobile communication mode).
A major benefit of mobility is – or at least should be – its ability to enable deeper levels of collaboration. Collaboration itself is a broad topic, but, in short, it centres on providing flexibility and empowerment for staff. Today’s collaborative workers are not static, nor mono-modal. They fulfil many roles and functions and frequently change duties depending upon work demands.
By pigeon-holing workers into abstract categories, we limit our ability to provide them with adequate mobile services and solutions. There is no such thing as an ‘alert’ mobile worker. Rather a worker may be an ‘alert’ worker in specific situations and a ‘power-worker’ in other situations.
Likewise, individual workers do not sit uniformly on a sliding scale. A worker may not need a great deal of ‘reach’ in one situation, but a large amount in another. Put simply, workers flit between categories and requirements. Strategies that place rigid categorisation on workers result in mobility deployments (and even security and access policies) that are not flexible enough to cope with the changing roles of today’s workers, and investment in an infrastructure that cannot readily address the needs of individual workers.
Strategic planning for the real world
Despite the admonishment of the current batch of popular abstract models for mobile planning, they do have a role in strategic planning: they give us common vocabulary for describing different types of mobile application usage. Rather than applying these model categories to workers, the categories can be applied to specific applications. This allows us to return to a more formal strategy development process that focuses on business goals, processes, the tools required by workers to meet those goals and the necessary infrastructure requirements. This robust mobile strategy formation process is outlined in the mobile strategy development figure below.
Next steps
Developing a mobile strategy for your organisation should not be undertaken lightly. Organisations should avoid using overly simplistic, rigid user categories. Instead, it must include input from many aspects of the business. When creating a mobile strategy:
- Define organisational goals. While most organisations can articulate highlevel goals (such as improving staff efficiency through innovation) from the highest levels of the organisation, it is the joint task of business and IT executives to tease out specific, actionable goals in relation to mobility (such as allowing road crews to remain in the field rather than returning to an office). Although these goals may be informed by what is possible with mobile technologies, they should not dictate the use of specific technology or approaches, but focus solely on business issues.
- Examine processes. A team comprised of both IT and business management (or process experts) should examine the current processes surrounding the scoped goals and determine ways in which these processes could be improved. At this stage, key performance indicators may also be developed in relation to mobility projects. It should be noted that until recently, businesses have only evaluated formal, structured processes and cases where exceptions may occur. With mobility planning, the organisation must also consider where and when ad-hoc process will be needed, the need for collaborative processes (see Rethinking Collaboration, IBRS, September 2007).
- Identify needs. Armed with process knowledge from step two, IT and business management can now prioritise specific business needs where mobility should play a role. The sources and types of information required to meet these needs must be identified, along with processes that need to be empowered through mobile technologies.
- Evaluate environments. IT should then determine the environments where the new mobile applications will be needed. Obviously, a focus should be placed on evaluating the network environment of these locations. However, it is also important to consider the physical aspects of the environments that impact not only on the type of device that could be deployed, but also on the type of user interfaces that would be appropriate.
- Define applications. At this stage an organisation will have sufficient information to create formal specifications for specific mobile projects, and also to determine an overall (though likely to evolve) mobile application architecture.
About IBRS Intelligent Business Research Services Pty Ltd (IBRS) is an Australian company that provides research and advice to IT and business managers in Australasian organisations.
Joseph Sweeney is an IBRS advisor specialising in the areas of unified communications, collaboration, mobility and Microsoft products and licencing. He was a founder and Vice President of Asia Online, where he assisted the start-up of one of Asia’s leading Internet and online services. Joseph was also the lead research analyst with Gartner covering internet and business solutions.
Posted by ccstrategy on September 1st, 2011
Collaboration technologies enable communication over a number of media. The technology provides a highly interactive experience for end-users and also assists the business in improving workforce productivity, streamlining business processes and reducing travel costs.
In addition to the standard voice and video conferencing capabilities, typically a web collaboration platform will include the following functions and features:
• Application/document viewing.
• Application/document sharing.
• Presenter(s) control passing.
• Hand raising or question submission.
• Pointer.
• Annotation.
• Chat (IM).
• Slideshows.
In the past, collaborative tools were seen as standalone applications, with minimal integration and interoperability with other business applications, telephony systems and other conferencing products. However, major collaborative platforms now support VoIP and video conferencing as well as integration with email applications.
Telsyte saw collaboration really take off in 2008, and it is likely that when we finish 2009 will be another fruitful year for the technology. Decision makers, from both the small-medium enterprise (SME) and the mid-market and large enterprise (MLE) segment, have embraced the technology and utilising it to improve business processes and productivity internally, while extending their reach to their customers.
Productivity and cost savings
Telsyte’s research has shown that in 2009, reduction of cost and improvement in workforce productivity have the highest business priority in the minds of decision makers, followed by streamlining business processes. With the reduction of headcount, decision makers are looking to leverage technologies to compensate for this reduction and improve productivity.
The trend of globalisation and the demarcation of national and geographical boundaries in conducting business efficiently have also driven collaboration to the forefront of the minds of decision makers. The need to mitigate time differences to achieve business continuity is an important driver for collaboration.
Top five business priorities for 2009
|
% of MLE businesses
|
| Productivity |
78% |
| Cost reduction |
78% |
| Business process improvement |
74% |
| Collaboration |
68% |
| Revenue growth |
60 |
Collaboration and the global financial crisis
The current economic climate has been a catalyst for the rise of collaboration, both in the form of web collaboration and video conferencing. The immediate benefits flow from cost savings from the reduction of travel cost, in line with the increased pressure to reduce OPEX. The readiness of a number of collaboration technologies is also a key factor in driving growth. Telsyte believes that the demand for collaboration will increase as the current global downturn continues and will have significant impact in shaping the way businesses interact with customers in the future. Telsyte has observed that, in the past 12 months, the financial services and government sectors are especially keen to evaluate collaboration/conferencing solutions.
Collaboration offers the proposition that businesses across the market can easily understand and associate with – cost savings, the most prevalent proposition in this current economic climate. For a typical Australian business, the ICT spend makes up only a small portion of the business OPEX. Collaboration offers businesses the opportunity to significantly reduce operating expenses associated with not only distance-based communications but also virtualisation of the office environment from anywhere, for both the road warrior and the teleworkers. This enables businesses to reduce travel costs, and employee on costs as well as enhancing workforce productivity.
Web collaboration for Australian SME market
Web collaboration tools are especially relevant for the SME market, due to the pay-per-use pricing arrangements that are available. The service is also a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, which limits the additional burden on internal IT resources. The operation is generally simple and the user interface is intuitive, where a non-technologist can easily navigate with limited training.
In the SME market segment, Telsyte has found that businesses are embracing the benefits of web collaboration, with close to 40% of businesses having used the on-demand services. A further 25% of SME decision makers have indicated a willingness to use the technology in the next 12 months. Telsyte observes that web collaboration, as an on-demand service is attractive to the SME market for the following reasons:
• Pay per use.
• Ease of use – minimal training required for the use of collaboration platforms.
• Interoperability with current desktop environment.
• Hosted services decreases the burden on IT staff (if any).
• Minimal capital expenditure needed for the use of the service.
• Manageable costs with per minute or monthly licence pricing model.
• Minimal commitment required regarding usage and spend.
In contrast to web collaboration, SMEs are less receptive towards video conferencing technologies, with only 15% having used video conferencing in the past. Nearly 40% of SME decision makers have also declared that they have no plans to use the technology at all. Telsyte believes that, for SMEs, an on-premise solution may incur capital that is scarcely available and is also likely to increase complexity for the internal ICT environment. Hence, a less attractive proposition of SME decision makers.
Decision makers are also finding web collaboration tools far more flexible, dynamic and intuitive for the needs of their businesses. Hence, the growth of the web collaboration market in the SME segment stifles the uptake of other forms of conferencing technologies.
Collaboration as an external communications tool
Collaboration and conferencing technologies have traditionally been used primarily as an internal tool to enhance business productivity and improve business processes. However, Telsyte has detected a shift in the usage of the application with Australian businesses increasingly embracing the technologies as a means to have closer interaction with suppliers and customers, filling the communication gaps in the supply chain in both a business-to-business and business-to-consumer context.
An example of an external focused implementation is training and support, where the business offers training and support services to end customers via collaboration tools. This type of implementation offers scalability, where agents are able to provide training and support to multiple customers on basic access/enquiries to core services and troubleshooting basic issues. In the process, the business can reduce the burden on the contact centre, both in terms of inbound calls and other forms of contact, allowing agents to dedicate resources to support more complex issues and enquiries.
Posted by ccstrategy on September 1st, 2011
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