Contact centers have always to do more with less, and not surprisingly they have been on the practical edge of technology solutions and practices including e-learning, IP telephony, IVR/speech rec, monitoring, telework, and workforce management. Tools and techniques spearheaded by contact centers, such as the shift to home-based workers, are according to the Telework Coalition being watched and adopted by other sectors.

It is a welcome sign that the Obama Administration is tech savvy, which will encourage development of new technologies and methods that will help contact centers, and all other business functions and sectors, become even more productive and efficient. As noted in Rich Tehrani's recent blog "you begin to realize there could be a massive shot in the arm for the tech sector next year."

Our sector has to do our part, instead of relying totally on government. Fortunately the business cases for adopting IP, telework and speech rec especially are powerful, and if deployed on a widespread basis could lower costs across the board while improving productivity sufficiently to pull us out of the doldrums.

An excellent TMC webinar sponsored by IEX, a NICE systems company last week revealed that the potential US employer annual savings through telework from reduced absenteeism, recruiting costs, and from increased productivity could be as high as $441 billion. A webinar earlier this year by Aumtech, Microsoft, and JetBlue demonstrated that you can successfully deploy speech rec at the fraction of typical costs.

There are open-source, hosted, and outsourced solutions for these applications that can enable their adoption with low up-front outlays. The individual and nationwide ROI is there.

So what are we waiting for?