* Posts by Arthur Rosenberg

2 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2008

Unified Communications and the productivity debate

Arthur Rosenberg

UC Productivity Issues

I am surprised that you haven't acknowledged the business productivity perspectives of UC previously described over the last several years. My colleagues at UC Strategies.com have labeled individual user time savings as "UC-U" and business process time savings as "UC-B." The former has been estimated as around a half an hour of time savings a day. But that doesn't really mean much if you can't use that time productively.

On the other hand, what they have labeled as business process productivity or "UC-B," can be extremely valuable, either in generating revenues, reducing costs , or avoiding operational losses. several years ago, I originally used the terms "micro-productivity" for UC-U and "macro-productivity" for UC-B," because the real value is not based on a single individual's time but on the performance of a group of individuals involved in a particular task or business process that has the UC-B payoffs mentioned.

Not all processes have the same UC-B values, so even there the trick is to selectively implement UC capabilities for individual users where the UC-B value is is highest, and that doesn't mean just cost reductions! Line of business management, not IT, must be responsible for identifying those UC-B needs.

Where UC will start generating the most benefits will not be in "person-to-person" communications, but in "process-to-person" contacts, better known as Communications Enabled Business Processes" (CEBP), which will enable an increase in business process automation and minimize the human latency involved with traditional person-to-person contacts.

Your business communications are a mess

Arthur Rosenberg
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The Contact "Mess" Has To Do With Addressing People Too

Think about all the communication modalities having their own addressing schemes, let alone multiple addresses within each scheme. The contact methodologies have also been device and interface-centric, network centric, and sually location-based. In reality, we want to contact a person wherever they may be, and in whatever modality that is convenient for the contact initiator, and let the contact recipient decide what way they can respond at that moment in time. In other words, we have get down to the level of the individual user and their role in initiating or responding to communication contacts.

I have been writing about this perspective for several years now, and starting to see some of the changes that are being brought about by multimodal mobile devices as well as by applying speech recognition to voice messaging that lets the recipient retrieve and manage voice mail more efficiently in text. The latter will let users exchange messages across media and, with UC, enable escalation, where appropriate, to a person-to-person call or a multi-party "instant" voice or video conference. All of this is on top of exchange information and data files.

As you correctly point out, let's look at the communication problems we have been living with since day one, and with the converged network infrastructure of the Internet, rethink how we really want to communicate.