October 31, 2007
Ghostbusters and New "Law of Collaboration"
In the sprit of Halloween, I thought about the classic Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis film, Ghostbusters, after apparently defeating the evil spirit “Gozer,” the character Winston Zedmore joyously declares: “We have the tools. We have the talent.”
In an offbeat way, these comedians created a snapshot of many of the collaboration issues that businesses are dealing with in the area of Unified Communications and Web 2.0 social networking technologies. How do you marry the rich complex talent of your employees, partners and customers to solve a business challenge within the secure boundaries of your information and communication systems?
To be more pointed, a significant challenge arises when you try to break down command and control business cultures to create agile enterprises that embrace inclusion, while maintaining the boundaries of privacy and security and adhering to ever-increasing industry regulations such as accounting reform (Sarbanes-Oxley), health care information privacy (HIPPA), and account data security (PCI). While “the wall” on Facebook is a great place to post messages, I am not sure most people want their dentist or banker posting private information in this emerging communications environment.
The broad range of business-class unified communications – including IP telephony, messaging, presence, web and audio conferencing, email, contact center, CRM, business video and telepresence, and digital media systems – used among and across a range of device environments increasingly requires an open, yet secure way, to interoperate, even if such systems were not designed to work together.
The process of Collaboration is, at its heart, about effectively improving team output, and particularly the behavioral and communications capabilities of those teams – whether they are made up of 2 or 2000 people. It requires a view about diversity in business that is not political, but rather, about the power of talent inclusion. Hence the underlying power of Unified Communications technology -- which I see as the gearbox of Collaboration – requires a certain rethinking that spans both cultural and social mores.
Culturebusters
The “Culturebusters” analog for Collaboration is a rich understanding that a diversity of talents and perspectives can improve a work product. At Cisco, many of our customers host and drive discussion forums about the efficacy and quality of our products. What was once reserved as a semi-annual set of ritual “Technical Advisory Boards” is now complemented by a real-time set of open discussion forums on our public website. Granted, it is not always pretty to get somewhat unvarnished input, but it makes for better products. As Harold Ramis says about Signourney Weaver after taking her through a polygraph early in Ghostbusters to verify a supernatural experience: “She's telling the truth -- or at least she thinks she is.”
Communicationsbusters
What we are now learning is that lots of communications tools that were not designed to work together actually benefit the work experience if you can bring them together. Business video enabled in WebEx bundled with call control and presence is a phenomenal “mash-up.” We are effectively “crossing the streams” on the “proton packs” by bringing traditional and disparate communications and desktop messaging architectures together, and more significantly, in a mobile environment.
The real next wave of communicationsbusters will come when we add even more speech recognition and visual input interfaces into unified communications, as I wrote about in a mobility blog about Gallaudet University last year. By allowing people with visual or hearing impairment to participate in our economy, we will be able to unlock the talent of more than 30 million Americans. That’s a lot of talent to include by not just depending on the keyboard or the keypad.
Business advantage enabled by Collaboration, I would posit, is best advantaged by those systems that securely flatten layers of communication and support the most diverse, unification across networks, applications and devices. Here is Cohen’s “Law of Collaboration” (with a clear “assist” from Bob Metcalfe): the power of the collaborative business environment is the sum of communications tools that are integrated to support rich media communications times the number of platforms it supports.
Now, who ya gonna call?
Posted by Alan Cohen at 08:00 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
October 26, 2007
"Play Nice"
Post by Phil Heyneker, executive communications manager
As has been the case with any industry in its earlier stages, unified communications is still in its “pie-growing phase”. A few years ago, we thought this would be a $19B market by 2010. Today, in 2007, unified communications is roughly a $25B market, and we see it growing another $10B over the next few years. As the industry matures, success for suppliers will depend on our ability to work together in the interest of our customers, and address a few understandable concerns along the way. This posting will cover a few of these industry challenges and customer concerns around UC, and what we need to do as an industry to address them.
Play Nice!
While we all agree on some common attributes, we haven’t really reached a unanimously agreed upon definition of UC in the market today. In fact, research has indicated that only 10-11% of customers are even aware of UC as a solution set. But it makes sense that this is happening, as dozens of suppliers are approaching the market from various angles. Traditional voice suppliers, network suppliers, messaging software players, business application providers, video players, and mobility players are all doing their best to tell a compelling story that caters to their business. But if, at its most basic level, UC is the integration of all forms of business communications (voice, video, data, mobility), then each of these suppliers is actually quite relevant to the UC industry, each has a right to tell its own story in the space, and each has to recognize the other’s right to be there.
For obvious reasons, customers don’t want this kind of fragmentation of the market, though. They don’t want to be forced into making an “either/or” decision on one flavor of UC versus another. They want a solution that works and they don’t want to be limited to a single vendor’s capabilities. The answer will lie in how we build partnerships across relevant technology areas to remove the risk for the customer of having to choose. This is going to require some pride swallowing on the behalf of all UC suppliers, but it’s an essential step in delivering UC to our customers.
Part of enabling choice for customers also lies in our ability to deliver them an open architecture on which to build. With UC, there’s no question that the innovation has just begun, and there’s a lot more to come. With as many big players approaching UC from so many angles, who are any of us to assume that the best innovations will all come from a single supplier? Suppliers who force customers to adopt a proprietary architecture for UC are making this assumption and are forcing their customers into that dreaded “either/or decision”. Not only are they choosing the solution to address their needs today but, more importantly, they’re pigeonholing themselves into using that solution to address their needs tomorrow. But wait….how do they know what their business needs will be tomorrow?
The alternative to a proprietary architecture is a true platform for UC, which is what most players in the industry are talking about today. A platform, by definition, is something that people can build things on top of. In the technology world, this means it must be open, extensible and pervasive such that the customer, the supplier, other suppliers, partners and developers can build new and custom technologies on top of it. A platform is not something that only the supplier can build on top of. It doesn’t count if everything has to come from the same company. As an industry, we need to work together and quickly adopt standards in order to offer customers as open, extensible and flexible a UC platform as possible.
Posted by Cisco PR at 11:52 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 23, 2007
WebEx and Oracle Mashup
Post by Colin Smith, Director, WebEx Corporate Communications
Today WebEx and Oracle announced an alliance to deliver Oracle’s on demand CRM via the WebEx Connect platform. WebEx is now offering Oracle’s Siebel CRM on demand service through the WebEx Connect application ecosystem. In an Infoworld article also published today, Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting said there is a lot more that can be done with WebEx's ability to "get to the desktop." "The fact that WebEx has a platform for SaaS delivery is one of the best kept secrets," said Greenbaum.
Posted by Cisco PR at 01:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 22, 2007
Customer Loyalty and the Perils of Incorrect Routing
Post by Ross Daniels, Director of Contact Center Solutions Marketing
I care about customer service. Not just as a customer, but because my livelihood is somewhat dependent on it. I market Cisco's Unified Contact Center solutions. So, I think about customer care. Often. And I'm always on the lookout for examples of good, bad, and indifferent service. With that in mind, I'd like to kick off this blog with a recent travel story which illustrates two core themes in customer service today.
On a recent business trip to Toronto, I found myself at the wrong end of an airline's customer loyalty program. Attempting to fly home to Boston after a successful three-day business trip, I was "bumped" from my oversold flight. You might be reading this and think "Bumped? Who gets bumped from a flight?" Well, as best I can tell, it's the people that rarely, or never, fly that particular airline. I had arrived at the airport well in advance of the airline’s suggested check-in time (this makes me unlike many frequent fliers). When I was denied a seat assignment at the check-in kiosk, I was mildly surprised. When I asked a check-in agent for a boarding pass and was told, “You’ll have to handle that at the gate,” I was mildly concerned. When I was told by the gate agent, “You’ll have to wait until I board these other passengers first,” I was greatly concerned. I had followed all instructions, yet I (along with two other unfortunate travelers) was the one being bumped. The airline, I’m sure, was following its policy, and that policy must have included a check for a flier’s “status” with the airline. The airline differentiated its service based on customer loyalty. Ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thing a contact center marketer like me would have advised them, and it’s what Frost & Sullivan analyst Ian Jacobs advises in a recent article.
Now that I had been prioritized by the airline as a low value customer (oh, the shame), I began a 90-minute ordeal to get myself rebooked, housed for the evening, and compensated. First, a long wait in a line with a dozen travelers stranded from other flights, mostly due to weather problems. Two customer service reps (except for the few minutes when there was only one rep after the second rep cheerfully left the counter for the night with a line full of angry would-be travelers glaring at her), eight people in line ahead of me, and an eight minute transaction time. I don’t know much about Erlang and queuing theory, but I know that I waited in that line for a good long while. Finally reaching the front of the line, the customer service rep was unable to 1) book me on a flight the next day 2) book me into a hotel for the night 3) provide the compensation I was entitled to. “Why did they send you to this line,” she asked. I was a victim of mis-routing, one of the top complaints of callers to a contact center.
Having been involved in the contact center industry for the last eight years, I have seen some remarkable transformations in the business. We have seen the wide adoption of multi-channel solutions to enable web-based customer service. Companies have introduced speech recognition to their interactive voice response systems (although this hasn’t necessarily led to better customer service—more on this in another blog). Organizations have made use of IP telephony and unified communications to virtualize their customer care operations. But at the end of the day, most people—myself included—think that customer service experiences have gotten worse. I believe passionately that enterprises can do much to improve their customer service, and I’ll be writing more on this topic over the next several months.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking into the frequent flyer program for a certain Canadian airline.
Posted by Cisco PR at 12:32 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 18, 2007
Extend The Experience To All
Post by Salvatore Collora and Taylor Collyer
Cisco took the telecommunications world by storm in 1999 with the acquisition of Selsius Systems. In the past eight years, the stalwarts of the industry that once laughed at the notion of ubiquitous use of IP telephony now see it standing at the precipice of the next industry shift to unified communications. While some might call for “VOIP As You Are” (marketing spin and jargon abound), the reality is that people work differently now that in the past and companies cannot stand still and operate as they do now if they want to be leaders in their industry and attract the best next-generation talent.
My near ten-year career at Cisco has spanned Systems Engineering, Advanced Services Delivery and now Product Marketing. I have clearly seen the shift from information workers sitting in cubes all day to a more spatially independent and collaborative workforce. Key business decision makers as well as first-line managers realize that keeping the best talent often requires a diverse mix of incentives, foremost of which is the ability for people to work anywhere at any time and be more productive as a result.
My own experience reflects this reality. I mostly work from home. This saves the company real dollars and radically increases my productivity. I roll out of bed and immediately begin working rather than spending 45 minutes stuck in traffic on the way to the office. I easily mix synchronous and asynchronous tasks to fit the need. But when I need to be on the go, I work much the same way armed with a large communications toolset consisting of IP phones, a MacBook Pro, a Bluetooth headset, a mobile phone, and soft client that contains instant messaging, video, voicemail and directory lookups.
The point here is that my workspace shifts but my environment suits me. My meetings find me, my inbound calls find me; on many devices in many workspaces.
Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing, the product I manage, allows our customers to extend the workspace of every user by offering the full capability set in a single package. The concept is not a new one, but we improved upon the structure used by many companies by including all the necessary licensing components and software into a single package and letting customers engineer the proper designs at no added cost. We also tied this notion of a complete and available unified workspace to a blanket of 24x7 support and upgrades, both major and minor. In this way, the customer pays one price per user up front and then an ongoing yearly cost for full support and upgrades. As more functionality becomes available in software, the customer gets immediate access at a very low price.
As Cisco innovates and more functionality is built into the products and new products are added to the portfolio, this expands the capabilities and productivity to the end-user. In the end, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about evolution beyond the desktop – it’s about enabling and empowering your users in all their workspaces, whatever and wherever they may be.
Some further elaboration on this can be seen on the video blog post below by Taylor Collyer, Director of Product Management, Cisco’s Unified Communications Business Unit.
Posted by Christie Miranda at 01:37 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 16, 2007
VIDEO: Charlie Giancarlo on Collaboration Technology
Cisco's CDO, Charlie Giancarlo discusses the different aspects of collaboration technology as well as its practical applications in the work place and eventually in the home.
In this video blog he answers the following questions:
1. What is your vision for collaboration in the next generation workplace?
2. What is Cisco doing technologically to enable collaboration?
3. When will TelePresence be in the home?
Posted by Christie Miranda at 01:26 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
October 15, 2007
VIDEO: John Chambers on Collaboration, Innovation and Teamwork
Our CEO, John Chambers, wrote about collaboration for the first entry on this new blog. Cisco Vice President Alan Cohen followed up with an interesting take on Unified Communications and where Malcolm Gladwell and Woody Allen fit into the picture.
Today, our CEO offers a video blog on his high-level thoughts on collaboration and why it is so important to the economy. He answers the following questions:
1. Why is collaboration so important in a global economy?
2. What is the most important component of a company's collaboration strategy?
3. How is collaboration changing global management? And why now?
4. What is Cisco's role in collaboration?
Posted by John Earnhardt at 09:59 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)
October 11, 2007
Woody Allen, Malcolm Gladwell and Unified Communications
At Cisco’s recent CIO Summit, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, reminded us how people draw their conclusions from rapid cognition as much they do from detailed analysis. In discussing how companies could be more effective from a sales and marketing perspective, he suggested: “if you can personalize a product or service, you can find the crack in the door.”
Much of what I have been thinking about recently in the UC/Collaboration space follows a similar logic. I call it the “nose at the glass.”
Traditionally, when work occurred at the office -- instead of on the road, in your car, at the airport, from a hotel or at home – there was a time-honored idea that you would go find someone and deal with an issue if something was important enough. Even if they were on the phone, you could stand in front of their office window and make your urgency known. If the person you needed to work with was on the phone or ignoring you, you could inch your way into the office until you could get their attention. Your “presence server” was based on the relationship you had with the other person.
With today’s never-ending stream of asynchronous communications, including unanswered emails, vmails, and text messages, business communications are probably suffering from a volume/quality perspective. If Woody Allen was to channel this, he would say “the food was lousy and there was too much of it.”
As companies become flatter, more global and more decentralized, unified communications can play a key role in re-establishing the urgency and “body English” of business. To wit, the reason why video and mobile communications technologies (such as TelePresence and Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator) are getting so much attention and demand is because they bridge us back to a more human time of business: when people worked with other people more than when they worked with machines.
When people look at TelePresence, they need to understand value is about business transformation rather than 1080p. Putting your employees, customers, partners, and supplier back into your office is the most efficient way to communicate and collaborate, especially when time and distance are a challenge. Powerful video communications provide for a full-on experience driving people to work with each other, really understanding, at a sociological basis, the other person’s level of engagement. As we like to say, being there is about being here.
Mobility is my favorite though. Allowing my office to move with me provides a greater level of continuity in communications. Knowing who is trying to reach me – and having the right capabilities to deal with open privileges of a flat communications environment – is a powerful tool in tightening the human elements of collaboration
And of course, doing this is a secure manner eliminates privacy and business risk of using open capabilities on the Internet, issues that both inspire and scare IT and business decision-makers alike.
The next wave of UC will come from bringing people back into our business processes in a way that allows them to both have meaningful collaboration as well as deal with information overload of a flat communications system. Who knows, perhaps Alexander Graham Bell was thinking of a long unanswered queue of letters when he invented the telephone. In his own words: “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
Posted by Alan Cohen at 09:54 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)
October 10, 2007
USHERING IN A NEW ERA OF COLLABORATION
John Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO
We are on the cusp of a new era where the Internet is transforming businesses large and small, and creating an entirely new environment for today’s workforce to communicate, collaborate and achieve. We have an opportunity to usher in a new era of economic growth and productivity and Internet-driven collaboration technologies are at the core of this transformation. Changing the very nature of work, these technologies are driving the rapid evolution of the workspace, where the desktop is complemented, and in some cases replaced, by smart phones and devices driven by a network-based platform.
As the value of information technology moves from the edge of the network into the core we will see a corresponding transition from transactional communications like phone calls and email to continuous collaborative experiences, similar to today’s social networking. Not only do we now expect to be able to connect to everyone from everywhere through every device—we expect it to be seamless, secure and simple. The intelligent network is what is making this possible.
Collaboration is the future. It is about what we can do together. And collaboration within and between firms worldwide is accelerating. It is enabled by technology and a change in behavior. Global, cross-functional teams create a virtual boundary-free workspace, collaborating across time zones to capture new opportunities created with customers and suppliers around the world. Investments in unified communications help people work together more efficiently. In particular, collaborative, information search and communications technologies fuel productivity by giving employees ready access to relevant information. Companies are flatter and more decentralized.
At the heart of these changes is the simple premise of connections and information. Cisco’s heritage has always been about connecting people---over the past 10 years, Unified Communications and Collaboration technologies are a natural extension of this heritage. Through these innovations, Cisco has led the way in developing next transformative applications of technology. A key example is video, a critical piece of any unified communications strategy. Cisco TelePresence unifies video with audio and information to create unique, in-person experiences between people, places, and events—all across the intelligent network. TelePresence is already transforming the way remote meetings take place. Consider this: one year ago I made 2 trips around the world to visit customers and it took me two weeks. Just recently, I visited the same number of customers, in the same number of international locations, in less than 8 hours, without leaving my office. The implications of this on the environment, a company’s competitive advantage and our quality of life, is tremendous.
Once upon a time, e-commerce and e-operations drove the Internet debate, but now it’s clear we have entered the second phase of the Internet. Although collaborative technologies and ‘Web 2.0’ have been around for many years, employing them through entire organizations will be made possible only by the intelligent network. At Cisco, we will drive this evolution with a vengeance. And we are going to help our customers do the same.
Posted by John Chambers at 11:13 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
