Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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UC for Collaboration

By Phil July 15, 2008 2:59 pm

The first UC market is for collaboration. It is about how we converge the desktop productivity environment that supports our Informal Personal Business processes (calendaring, email, etc.) with easy to use tools that combine communications, information, and business process.

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The key is the value that comes from having interactions happen sooner with the right tools. UC for Collaboration is primarily about people interacting with other people based on their agendas and personal work requirements. The value accrues to the company in enhancing the way people work, rather than changing the underlying formal business processes. In most business decisions, 70-90% of the time to make a decision is wait time with messages sitting on message queues. The opportunity is to reduce that time by 50-90% by assuring that the right people are available when they need to be to make the right decisions. This can translate into significant both productivity as well as revenue opportunities.

Next post I will talk about how companies will migrate and the differences between service, information, and knowledge workers.

To read other parts of this series, use these links:

Part 1: Unified Communications Definitions 1.0

Categories: Multimedia, Unified Communications, Architecture, Customers, Trends, Uncategorized Trackbacks (1)

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    July 24th, 2008 at 11:56 am from Nortel Blog: Enterprise Technology » Blog Archive » UC for Business

Comments

  1. Is this the same thing as “networking”? Aren’t we past that yet? I already have “presence”, “location” and “identity” (after a fashion) amongst my collaborative network.

    In your chart what is the difference between “convergence” and “enablement”?

    What I need are ways to make this easier to setup and to actually use these attributes to dynamically sort and prioritize while taking into account dependancies and critical paths. Sort of a dynamically networked project plan, if you will.

    July 15th, 2008 at 5:33 pm by many

  2. Just to elaborate a bit further; what is needed for progress in this area is an ontology for universal applications (including he communications application)interworking. I am going to begin to create one right now :)

    July 15th, 2008 at 5:55 pm by many

  3. I think the perspective is how integrated the applications and communications are together. for example having a single integration instead of sending a meeting invite, booking a bridge, and sending an email with content. As to convergence versus enablement; convergence is the overall transformation, it is the enablement of business processes with communications (I was going to touch on this in the next post).

    Your comment about project planning and comms is a natural extension of this as is the concept of a Personal Agent that uses Adaptive Intelligence and Pattern Learning to manage your availability (availability is presence and the other factors of current context modified with your preferences).

    Creating the ontology for communications integration through Web Services and the associated SOA Frameworks is exactly the path that we are on with the Nortel Agile Communications Environment (NACE). The goal is to create an environment that abstracts the underlying complexities of communications integration/enablement and allows the application developer to use Simple Services or create Composite Services that can be re-used across multiple environments.

    July 16th, 2008 at 2:18 pm by Phil

  4. Phil, can you elaborate a bit on the ontology?

    Given it is defined by vocabulary + meaning + machine understandable. I know the intent is to enable semantic integration and interoperability between the communications application (s) and other applications, but how so?

    What are the semantics? Is it two dimensional (e.g. User Network) or is it three or more? (e.g. Device context:Speed:capability Application context:location:presence:identity Network Context:home;roaming;unconnected) etc.

    Any whitepapers/greypapers?

    July 20th, 2008 at 10:46 pm by many

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