April 2009 Archives

You can't live without it but, boy, maintaining your inbox takes up way too much time!

Why.
The sheer numbers of emails in most corporate inboxes is a major culprit, and these days, spam is less the issue as spam filters are getting pretty good.

So what's the answer, since making a 25-hour day is not a practical option?

I see three elements.
1) email etiquette: Businesses need to recognize that email etiquette is at the source of the problem. Overuse of REPLY ALL, and CC are two major culprits. But old habits die hard and changing personal behaviour is a real challenge. UC Cellular took the relatively drastic step of declaring 'email-free Fridays' to make the point. But this will fail until better email etiquette ('netiquette') is established. Not that complicated! Here's 10 steps from Microsoft on the subject. After all it's a win-win for employees (except for those who self define their daily jobs and related job satisfaction as reading and/or responding and/or forwarding every email!).

2) Training. Like any tool, email can be used for business advantage or misused with potentially significant productivity impacts. My favorite is related to emails associated with meetings. I don't know about you, but my calendar is king. I personally am never sure how to change one instance of a recurring meeting without messing up the works! Getting this wrong in the past has resulted in considerable grief. These should be an option to 'revert to old calendar if i mess up', a rough analog to voice conference calling when I say "if I get this wrong, call me back'.

3) Stop the email chain: Not unrelated to the above is the notion of stopping a string of emails on a particular subject and adopting a more appropriate media to close on the subject at hand. For example, launch an IM and then call him/or her. You can do this 'out-of-band' but looking up a name or 'in-band' by simply clicking on it. This is one element of Unified Communications, which makes escalating from email to IM to voice to conferencing a click-away, and the reason for telecom vendors to team with email vendors, as Nortel has done with Microsoft and IBM. UC also includes Unified Messaging which can include listening to your email or reading your voicemail to make itr easier for you. If you think about it, social networking has likewise been invented to solve the inefficiencies of email.

So stop complaining about email overload, lead by example and tell IT what you need.

For years (I think I started in 1998), I carried an HP Jornada handheld PC (the first one literally fell apart so I got a more recent model which likewise was loved to death). I wrote over 100 articles, blogs and white papers on this handy device and took notes at numerous meetings. It was small enough to use on a plane even with the seat ahead oif me pushed back, and unobstructive enough not to put a barrier between me and a customer during a meeting.

It ran Windows CE and Pocket Office with Word, Excel and Powerpoint (view, hide and reorder only). I had PCMCIA cards for Ethernet, WiFi, PGA projectors (for powerpoint); I had an extra battery; I had a VPN client for corporate network access (including email) and could sync up my contacts and calendars with my desktop. Often I traveled without my laptop avoiding significant muscle strain;)

When looking for a replacement, I would have bought another Jornada but this form factor was not generally available (Netbooks have now filled this niche). My needs were simple: small form factor including keyboard; always on; integration with my office Windows environment (i.e. Exchange) and with OCS 2007; and good word document handling.

So I bought an HP iPAQ with a foldable keyboard, running Windows Mobile 6- the latest and greatest. Exchange access and Office Communicator ran like a jewel (and was VPN-less), but, possibly of no surprise to you, Windows Mobile was awkward to use and felt archaic. Even though I was well acquainted with Windows CE, an early predecessor, I still had to learn a new user interface which was neither Windows nor CE. To this day, I still can't figure out how to open two documents at once!

WiFi access on the device was also very finicky, particularly for corporate network access- I couldn't find a VPN client that worked, and 802.11i was very flakey; even guest access requiring a browser-based login didn't work even when I called in the IT gurus.

With less than 13% market share (behind Symbian and RIM in 4Q08, with Apple nipping at its heels), Microsoft has a big job ahead if it's to be as relevant in the mobile world as it is desktops.

Caveat: My experience was on a PDA (not a Windows mobile phone) and it's never clear how much was due to Microsoft vs HP.

Hyperconnectivity hit home personally when my daughter, a paleomammoligist, called home last summer via a satellite phone from an island in the far north in the region of the North Pole. A storm was raging and she was confined to her tent. Nice to hear her crystal clear voice as if she were down the street!

But the story doesn't end there.

She was leading an expedition that had just found the skull of a 20 million year old fossil that they had found the year before, making her find 65% complete. Extensive research established it as a 'missing link fossil', dubbed puijila darwini, the walking ancestor to seals, sea lions and walruses. Darwin predicted just such an animal when he wrote "A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted in an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brace the open ocean."

This made world news yesterday (Earth Day), culminating in an article in today's issue of Nature magazine.

But you (and/or your children) may want to get a more layman's explanation, which you can do at the Canadian Museum of Nature website.

A proud dad.

Let's take a look at the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Big news, that came out of nowhere after IBM tried to do the same. Big bucks for sure ($5.6B). But does it make sense?

Years ago, I picked up two slogan buttons- you know the kind that vendors hand out at tradeshows.

"Hardware makes software happen".

"Software makes hardware useful".

I picked these buttons up at a time when minicomputers and mainframes were king, and vertical integration was the norm. Since then, a significant amount of hardware and software commoditization has taken place, with these linked through vendor agnostic operating systems such as Windows or Linux.

Take the telecom industry. Telecom used to be a hardware centric vertically integrated world. With the exception of Cisco that thinks that apps should be vertically integrated with network hardware, the industry at-large is rapidly evolving towards telecom as a set of Web-Services-enable software applications running on commercial off-the-shelf servers. This eliminates the network (hardware) from becoming the bottleneck in application innovation, for example, when integrating communications into business applications and processes.

So why did Oracle buy Sun (Sunacle)? Beats me. My prediction- they will learn an expensive lesson, integrate the good stuff and end up divesting the hardware business.

Unified Communications (UC) includes new modalities such as social networking, though most UC solutions today don't deliver social networking solutions, beyond simple linkages such as blog or wiki click-to-call.

A lot has been said and written about the ROI for 'traditional' UC, but what about social networking (i.e. blogs, wikis, social bookmarks and the like)?

I think the angle that enterprises planning blog and wiki investments should consider is the value of these contextual communication tools is in making it easier to connect to co-workers that may have the skills and information needed to solve business problems. This can knockdown organizational barriers that slow down certain business processes today.

This is contrasted with unified communications that assumes you know who (by name or role) you need to reach.

Many hearing-impaired people use email and text messaging to communicate. Some, I'm sure, are using 3G wireless phones equipped with video cameras to communicate via sign language. Great idea, but high cost and battery life are real problems that are a bottleneck to wide adoption.

Until now!

A team of engineers from University of Washington in Seattle and Cornell have just about completed a functional prototype, they dub 'mobile ASL (American Sign Language)'.

I applaud this initiative to extend the value of hyperconnectivity to more people.

"Beware the Single Vendor as Trusted Advisor: Gartner". So read my blog of Oct 22 2007.

What's changed? Not much. Cisco is still reaping huge margins in its data business at the expense of its customers, who are also hit with higher energy bills.

Sure. Nortel has made a lot of noise about the Cisco Energy Tax and the superior performance of its products- up to 40% advantage in this area.

Cisco's launched Energywise, but that hasn't made Cisco switches any more efficient, and just locks the customer further in.

So what's the prognosis?

There is lots of talk about who might be looking at Nortel Enterprise and different scenarios of how Nortel may re-emerge after creditor protection. Hopefully, whatever happens, in the end, enterprises will have a bigger choice in how they build their data networks.

Anything is better for enterprises than one dominant vendor.

Hyperconnectivity is brought to you by an explosion in cell phones and in networked sensors for everything.

Eric Paulos of Carnegie Mellon University is proposing to converge these two hyperconnectivity trends by shifting cell phones from being purely personal communications devices to being "networked mobile personal measurement instruments."

For example, many cell phones have GPS positioning capabilities and many are starting to integrate motion detectors (e.g. for Wii-style gaming). Combining these two into a massively distributed, earthquake early warning system may reap huge benefits for science and mankind.

Innovation comes from interdisciplinary thinking such as exemplified by Dr Paulos.

Bo Gowan wrote a nice piece on yours truly, but the picture (vintage 1980) needs some explaining.

I'm thinking particularly of the device covering a good part of my desk. This was a VuCom 1 made by Control Data Corp. It was basically a CRT screen and a keyboard. It was a very heavy and very thin client connected by a 1200 bit/s async circuit to the cloud, actually a Nortel packet network.

This 'dumb terminal' knew nothing about packets, in fact, it only knew characters typed, including control characters such as carriage return. Packet processing was relegated to a shared device- a terminal server or, in the standards community, a Packet Assembler Disassembler. Terminal servers took individual characters and strings of characters, sped them up onto a 56Kbit/s 'high speed' circuit, and mapped them into packets with appropriate headers.

What could I do with such a device- surf the net of course. I could access first generation email systems and corporate directories, print off reports, and even access the National Library of Medicine (if I wanted to access thousands of medical abstracts).

This was soon to be replaced by a Mac;)

The National Workers' Housing Fund Institute (Infonavit), a government mortgage provider with offices throughout Mexico, recently announced that a Nortel-Microsoft solution which will replace a number of non-Nortel PBXs with a software-centric UC solution built around OCS 2007.

Nortel's role? Professional services, the Nortel Communication Server 1000 and Secure Router 4134 both integrated with OCS, a Nortel Contact Center solution, and Application Gateways .

This will save an average of 30 minutes per employee per day and result in a payback of 13 months.

Two messages:
1. CIO's are looking for day one demonstrated business value from their investments.
2. The Nortel-Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) is alive and well and, with this win, has chalked up over 1200 wins.

I will be retiring on April 10 after 37 years in Nortel. The decision was actually made pre-filing, but I decided to stay on to participate in one last VoiceCon, my swan song so to speak.

I have spent my career help create networking for a hyperconnected world.

Back in the 70s (what I called my pioneering years), when the world was circuit switched and flat, and when the ARPAnet was running on minicomputers over 4.8Kbps lines (not a typo), I was part of the team mandated to develop a carrier-grade packet switch that could support 56 Kbps trunks. This created the opportunity to interact with some of the networking visionaries of the time: Vint Cerf, Larry Roberts, Louis Pouzin, Derek Barber to name a few. Nortel delivered a switch that could handle 10 packets per second, but test equipment of the day could only measure 1 packet per second! Remember, the IBM PC came in the next decade!

One highlight was writing a technical paper (co-authored by Bell, France Telecom, Telefonica and Telenet) that was accepted by the IEEE Communications Conference and the National Computer Conference a month later. This was the start of IT Convergence.

We have all experienced the enormous technology changes that have occurred over the years. Let me illustrate this in dollars per bit terms. Back in the early 80s, I built an Apple II clone. Memory was a huge chunk of the cost, all 48 Kbytes of it. Last year, I received a 1Gig USB memory stick (a standard give-away these days) for speaking at a Microsoft OCS launch event... in early 80s dollars, this was worth $250,000,000. Wow!

I will now leave it to others to create applications that live in this hyperconnected world, like the web.alive application that I demo'ed at the Nortel booth (nothing like working the booth at a trade show... one last time).

Interestingly, my retirement has entered the social networking space, in the form of a blog by Rich Tehrani who attended a surprise dinner Nortel threw for me at VoiceCon earlier this week. Also attending were several Nortel execs and four leading industry analysts. Rich is my mentor at TMC and always has his camera handy. It was a lovely evening with lots of shared memories and a great send-off.

O yes, dear reader, while the joy of retirement comes from not having any plans, I do plan to continue this blog.

I participated yesterday in a session at VoiceCon called Presence- Dial Tone of the Future?

May I have the envelope please.

The answer is NO.

Why?

Dial tone tells you that you can make a call and doesn't tell you anything about the status of the person you are calling. That's what presence is all about.

Presence, which all the panelists consider a key capability of UC, should be thought as a key element of the broader topic of context.

Here's what I consider to be the four key dimensions of contextually enhanced UC:
> Knowledge of the identity and respective roles of individuals in a work flow is essential to any context-aware communications.
> Presence/reachability includes physical activity and applications being accessed.
> Location is about where, in which direction and how fast.
> Situation/activity/event includes the business process needs for reduced time to X, various entities in the decision making process, the urgency of the matter at hand, and any relevant real-time and/or historical content, potentially delivered as notifications and alerts.

IBM made the added point, and I agree, that presence and more generally context, is a key enabler, not only for point-to-point and multipoint UC mostly with people on your contact list, but also for social networking with people potentially that you haven't even met.