Recently in Business aspects Category

Late last year, I did a podcast on the day of the OCS2007 launch at a music studio in Toronto. This is part of Microsoft’s Canada monthly in-depth look at issues relevant to IT executives and managers across a range of Canadian industries. This podcast is entitled “The changing landscape of Unified Communications” and includes Vicki Mains of CNIB (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and a mutual customer), Erin Elofson of Microsoft, and myself. It’s 30 minutes, which hopefully will engage you during a good portion of your commute.

Something for your next commute. Drop me a not if you have any comments.

Sorry only available in English;(

I was being interviewed by the press a while back and was asked about best UC best practices. That got me thinking and I came up with the following top ten:

Best Practice #1: Develop a Vision and Strategy for Enterprise Transformation. It’s no longer just about how work is done, but how business processes are organized and accelerated for increased effectiveness.

Best Practice #2: Develop a UC business case around how UC accelerates time to X (X= revenue, service, service, product, decision) and business processes in general. This requires you to engage with business owners to understand which user communities and application environments to target.

Best Practice #3: Converge telecom with the desktop for a unified client experience. The telecom and IT industries are converging, as are user expectations.

Best Practice #4: Get control of your mobility environment and drive for business advantage. The future is mobility, but your mobility costs are escalating.

Best Practice #5: Partner with suppliers that will help you unify your UC infrastructure. UC has to be about both client and infrastructure unification, for maximum benefit and lowest TCO.

Best Practice #6: Add multimedia applications to your UC system based on business opportunities. The core of any UC system is IM/presence and telephony, but rich collaboration comes through multimedia applications.

Best Practice #7: Address needs to accelerate key business processes through communications enabled applications. Human latency in existing processes is impacting customer service and increasing business costs.

Best Practice #8: Establish a SOA-based communications enablement environment that will improve agility, accuracy and speed. Vertically integrated single vendor systems will not deliver the agility you need.

Best Practice #9: Invest in critical network infrastructures to deliver consistent quality of experience for UC users and the new generation of applications. With growing enterprise reliance on UC and communications-enabled applications, you need to get the facts about performance, energy efficiency and TCO.

Best Practice #10: Partner with suppliers that have the strategic partnerships in place and the solution breadth and services to plan, deliver and operate solutions that best fit business objectives.

Make sense? What's missing?

During the 90s, there was a lot of discussion on how IT should be (re-)organized to handle IP telephony.

With the emergence of software-centric unified communications, tightly integrated not only with email, calendaring and directories, but also with desktop applications and over time with business processes, it will be very interesting to watch how CIOs organize around this inevitability.

In fact, organizations designed for the 90’s could be an encumbrance to accelerated acceptance of UC and communications-enabled applications.

IT convergence changes not only how work is done, but how work is organized.

So where do you see going organizationally in 2008?

Hyperconnectivity creates new challenges in emergency situations.

Did you hear about the lady in Chicago who placed a 911 call from one of a two building small campus. She died when the first responders went to the wrong building!

This podcast features Mark Fletcher, who is the chairman of the PBX/Multi-Line Telephone System technical subcommittee of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). It’s 16 minutes long and could save your life;)

This blog is on TMCnet.

In January of 2008, TMCnet experienced 38,368,961 page views, with over 2.4 million unique visitors, each of which stayed an average for 28 minutes and 59 seconds this past month. In the past, 60% of the visitors were from outside the US. These numbers are nothing like what Google attracts with 129M unique visitors (according to Quantcast), but they are pretty big for a site that’s dedicated to a particular industry.

Without readers like you, this would not be possible.

Thank you and come back real soon;).

This is weird, but interesting!

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! \

So who needs a spell checker for IMs?

My father-in-law used to say (he was in video technology), “I give my customers what they need, not what they want”. He certainly wouldn’t have allowed feature creep to get in the way of delivering on this philosophy.

When we buy a car, while we may look at car magazines and day dream about owning a fully featured whatever (insert your favorite car here), many of us would narrow it down to the features we really want/need, and consider performance, maintenance costs and energy efficiency in making a purchase decision. We would be crazy to pay our hard-earned cash for features that we will never use (though there are many who go for a higher prestige to debt ratio!), and then pay again for increased gas consumption, maintenance costs or whatever.

Unfortunately, data networkers do this every day.

They buy technology based on the Cisco feature list (who have hundreds of features that seldom are used by any given customer) rather than on their feature requirements. As a result, they pay premium prices, and create unnecessary complexity which can impact performance, security, reliability and TCO. On reliability alone, it’s no secret that software complexity (multiple versions of IOS, features you don’t use, and resulting config errors) is a major contributor to failures.

One customer, Executive Director of Information Technology Services at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, did their homework and reported “We chose a Nortel data network solution over other vendors because it delivered superior resiliency, performance and a lower total cost of ownership."

So figure out what you want, or pay a consultant to help define your needs (not just create feature lists) and then get the facts on performance, energy consumption and reliability.

One of the strategic goals of the US Social Security Agency is “to deliver high quality citizen centered service”. Speeding up the disability claim and appeal process, while making better and more effective use of people, are two important priorities, according to the SSA’s 5-year strategic plan. It’s not uncommon for disability claims to spend over 500 days in backlog!

To meet its objectives, the SSA has established a strategic objective of “improving service through technology, focusing on accuracy, security and efficiency”. To that end, it makes extensive use of three key channels to its clients: 1600 field offices, a 55000 seat virtual contact center (employing 85% of the total staff), and its web portal.

So when the SSA embarks of a $300 million ten-year project for its Telephony System Replacement Project, it’s a significant proof point of the value of VoIP, particularly in a contact center environment. Customers with large connect centers tell us that virtualization of contact centers leveraging VoIP can lower costs, increase effectiveness and improve business agility.

A new survey finds that “More than seven out of 10 respondents expect VoIP to be ‘important’ or ‘extremely important’ to their organizations by late 2008.” Didn’t we see similar results even 5 years ago? Well, the facts are that less than 30% of PBX lines are IP phones. So what’s happening?

Here’s a clue. The survey continues that “More than three out of five organizations say they now view deploying unified communications at the end of 2008 as very important or “extremely important.”

So it’s less about TDM substitution, the original VoIP value prop, and more about moving the business forward and accelerating the business.

The value proposition for VoIP has now changed, to the point that VoIP is seen as a step to unified communications applications and to communications-enabled applications.

The business case is not about dial-tone, but about the business.

I got a comment (from someone called Tim) which I opted not to post in its original form because of its language. It was in response to my Nexus is no Lexus piece, but I suspect it was as much a comment on a number of my postings which challenged common perceptions on Cisco. In part it said: “Why are you in denial that Nortel's technology sucks and Cisco is kicking your ass.”

Our focus is not Cisco per se, but rather to be the best at solving enterprise business problems with communications technology. Our sales guys tell me that we win more often than we lose, often against Cisco, when we get ‘a chance at bats’. There are two challenges here: 1) the marketing challenge of making enterprises aware of Nortel products, software and services that can propel their business imperatives, and 2) the CXO challenge of helping CXOs realize that single vendor network-centric solutions do not necessarily give them the agility, performance and TCO structure that best meets their business needs.

Let me give you some data points:
Nortel reported 33% YoY growth in data networking and security revenues for 2007. Nortel data customers tell us that they are thus realizing improved network resilience, better network performance, greener IT and lower TCO.

According to Dell’Oro, Nortel maintained #1 leadership in worldwide total PBX (combined PBX, KTS, IP) line shipments for 4Q07 and for 2007.

Nortel announced 600 wins through its Innovative Communications Alliance UC solutions with Microsoft, which often include Nortel IP telephony, Nortel multimedia applications, business optimized networking and professional services.

Finally, we are getting tremendous CXO mindshare through our solutions for communications-enabled applications (as we have done with Orlando Regional Health), and our recently announced SOA-based Agile Communications Environment. For example, Nortel is the only telecom partner included in IBM’s Retail Integration Framework and in its Healthcare SOA-based solutions.

It’s great to be participating in a history-making transformation of a formerly great company. We’re not totally there yet, but recent customers such as the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the New York Times, Indiana University, and Rolls Royce are getting benefits today.