Conversationware

Sometimes, leaving a voicemail is more useful than speaking to someone in real time.

Of course it’s not black and white, it depends on the conversation.

But, to illustrate the point, haven’t you ever got someone on the phone, asked a question and then waited while you hear them um and ah, or scrabble about for some piece of paper.

How often does the person give up and say - “I’ll have to call you back”?

We’re taught very early on about the power of preparation. So, when you make a call, plan for the person not being there. And, if you are in the habit of leaving ‘good’ messages, quite often you’ll get more done than if you actually do get hold of someone.

Voicemail is panned because of the people leaving useless messages. It gets a raw deal.

Leaving a well structured voicemail outlining your objectives and timelines can be a boon to your own productivity rather than a halted progress.

Whats more, if the person needs help with the task you’ve just set, they can ask for help with those objectives by forwarding the message in YOUR words (and emotions), rather than their interpretation.

So, when someone leaves a message saying “Matt, call me back”, it’s very tempting not to.

Exposing a combined desk and telephone presence is like giving out your front door keys.

So, are your parents and best friends welcome around at ANY time?

The likelihood is that even if they have keys, the visit would still be agreed in advance. Either that, or perhaps you’d have a standing arrangement for a certain day of the week.

Work is a bit like that standing arrangement, a pact between colleagues to be available

But does your availability pact extend to everyone in your business, to any more people than you’re sharing projects with at that time, your immediate teams?

Does your being available ’depend’?

Because answering ’depends’ could mean you need to ‘manage’ your presence, and imagine setting presence when putting the kettle on.

So, even if someone is shown to be at their desk and not on the phone, they might not answer your phonecall…..it depends on

• What they’re doing,
• Who YOU are
• What you want to talk about.

Arranging conversations in advance 

My current experience is that even with presence tools, because they don’t automatically answer the above questions, we’re more often arranging conversations in advance.

there is an invitation…..then permission…for you to talk to them at a time, about something.

Most people email an invitation - but this is unrelated to real time communications and there has to be a better way than that. 

Even a ringing phone is an invitation, but ok, it’s basic, and the trouble with a voice invitation is that by the time you’ve asked, you’re already speaking to them. As an aside, having one dimensional presence tools does lend more weight to voicemail, which is probably the best invite to speak - if you use voicemail properly that is.

Presence on it’s own won’t replace voicemail

But back to the main point. Isn’t sending invitations much simpler than managing presence? I think it could be.

Would you turn up to your customer’s office without arranging it in advance?

And so, therefore, is presence the wrong tool for anything other than close relationships, which already have an element of assumed permission?

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Some other people’s posts on presence

Collaboration Loop (again) article on presence interoperability

Melanie argues that this is the holy grail for UC, but as you can guess from the title of this post, I’m not ‘holy’ convinced (groan)

Yes, the customer is king, and I would definitely love to see callcentre skillsets aggregated and shown online so that I could click to talk at my own convenience, but other work relationships are more complicated than that.

Alec of Iotum was the first to make me think about availability instead of just presence.

My understanding is that availability is ’presence’ with an overlay, which means that the questions - “Am I at my desk, am I on the phone”…should be supplemented with;

“do I want to talk to you” (right now) 

- Availability does need that vital permission component -

But that’s my own interpretation and words

Dan York argues that presence is critical, but doesn’t necessarily relate it to a telephone call, as he sees voice calls declining in importance.

I very much agree that voice is less useful than it used to be - but for some additional reasons, it deserves a future post.

Presence will be critical, but only once this permission requirement is worked out, and it needs something new, a better way to initiate and manage a conversation. It should definitely be conditional.

My wife uses a Virgin Media mobile phone and was having trouble with the voicemail

Because I work at something vaguely to do with telecoms and communications, my wife, along with the rest of my family and friends, postman and milkman, assume I know everything about everything with a plug or a battery, including mobile phones.

I spent the same amount of time that she did reading the manual and then called the helpline. Two days later, I discovered what had been going wrong and it was fixed.

So, Hero status wasn’t attained, but I noted that all that was required to log into my wifes voicemail was by the device calling its own number. (more…)

I’m an advocate of Gmail, with instant messaging, voice and voicemail built in - this coupled with desktop notification is significantly more useable for me than collections of web and client software from other vendors. Especially impressive is the ability to pick up gmail (and voicemails) on your mobile There is now a meebo-like web embedding of a group web chat facility,

The integration of a RSS reader with the email is more than convenient and with feedburner joining the ranks, I can see all of these things eventually supplementing the google desktop search tool to deliver me a very personalised search and delivery of tailored information.

Google has provided google docs, online hosted documents for groups to share, be updated and notified about. The aquisition of Jotspot hasn’t really hit yet, on the surface at least, but I’m looking forward to some basecamp type project collaboration from that, and now with google aquiring Zenter, we can have online slideshows and presentations too.

Youtube is starting to get quite useful, and I didn’t even mention google maps yet, which apart from giving me a quick, and slick, way to calculate journey times, has now gained a user business review facility

People question whether it is right to trust all your information to google, in the same way we trust banks with our money. But when I used Google Checkout to pay for a new laptop recently, instead of paypal, it occurred to me that many of us already do.

Where’s our unified communications Google? I know we can get voicemail through the mobile email, but surely that’s only the start.

The way I look at it, the term ‘Mobile Presence’ seems to be a contradiciton in terms. 

I originally read this linked article and found myself thinking the issue was very complicated. And now, having mulled it over in terms of whether this technology was something I would actually ‘use’ or not, I’m skeptical.

Leaving aside the ability to see if someone is on the phone or not….till another time at any rate…

My first thought was;

Because I always have my mobile with me does that mean I’m now always present?

Trouble is - I don’t want to instant message via a mobile phone if I can help it - as I’m usually busy being mobile and away from my desk.

Looking back, ‘Presence’ was coined by the Instant Messaging PC client, and therefore, to say I am ‘present’ actually means that I am at my PC desktop and contactable. Not being present means I have wandered off and am not going to respond.

In my book, this concept can’t be extended to a mobile phone, so ‘mobile presence’ is a misnomer. OK, enough with the re-iteration already already.

The meaning of Presence, has started to morph into ‘availability and willingness to interact’, and to that end a lot of discussion is being put into handling contacts, grouping them, and puttings rules against VIP versus double glazing people. And the bottom line is, I’m not sure about this.

So, in the instance I am away from my desk, I would pitch my voicemail against ‘presence’ technology as being most useful. Give me a call, and I’ll decide on the spot whether I’ll answer you or not, and, unlike a rules engine, I won’t ever get it wrong.

So, if I really can’t talk to you now, then leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as it is convenient. Of course, leaving a voicemail should in itself move the conversation onwards, so this isn’t a waste of either your or mine time.

I think that’s a lot easier than maintaining a presence engine via some small mobile screen that you forget to check every ten minutes, don’t you?

So couldn’t the communications industry just define Presence to mean Whether I’m at my desktop, or not?

It’s not perfect, so perhaps we should think more about how conversations are initiated, a more formal process that simulates that so repetitive IM, “can we talk?” 

That permission element is going to be all important

This post is incomplete, but then so is the industry

I’ve mentioned before that the key to understanding Unified Communications (all of it) is the software interfaces presented to the user. (You may notice I don’t mention voip at all in the following, it’s about users).

Unless the user is going to adopt functionality, there is almost no point deploying it…..and by definition the more interfaces there are, the more difficult adoption will be (how many training course will users go on).

Once the required interfaces are defined, it’s so much easier to put the technologies in the right place, or in the right box, so to speak, and so I have been framing business requirements around the GUI.

The reason I’m bothering here is that I have met with customers who have in front of them very interesting new products - but they overlap so much, and so how does one decide?

It can be as tricky as hell, as current comms software technology on offer includes

Messaging

• Email
• Voicemail
• Fax
• Text Messaging

Real Time Conversation interface,

• Instant Messaging - are you at your desktop
• Telephony - are you on the phone
• Conferencing, Audio dial in, dial out, desktop sharing, webinars
• Video conferencing, are you at your desktop

You can see overlaps wherever you look with UC - but there will be ‘at least’ two interfaces for users - as the ‘button’ requirements are different for messaging, to that of real time.

Messaging buttons; - Address, Send, receive, store, mark as urgent, copy, forward, and so forth

Real Time buttons; - Receive contact, Make Contact, whether IM, call, or video, include someone else in the conversation, transfer, desktop share, present, record, and so forth

• Messaging interfaces are reasonably well defined
• Real Time Conversation interfaces are in their infancy
• Personal Contact Handling isn’t well defined

However, for framing Unified Communication discussions and decisions, each user will probably have at least the first two initial interfaces for personal productivity.

A third interface should exist, but doesn’t yet (?)

Personal contact handling

• This doesn’t yet exist as a recognised ‘desktop based user interface’ category - although network based Grand Central is a good start in showing what will be possible
• Call routing and handling, where should calls go, onto which device, at what time
• Planning - willingness to engage, calendar integration, - Iotum is interesting
• Call processing, what happens to the caller if you can’t take the call
• More loosely defined is a meta directory, routing and capture application such as that delivered by Corebridge - because contact information pervades around all communications solutions, (and existing applications).

It isn’t clear where functionality to control personal contact handling will be interfaced by the user, - most of the above is handled at premises based system admin level currently - but it makes sense if all features to determine the inbound call routing for today, all end up in one interface, (if not provided by a single backend system) to be controlled by the user instead of Admin.

This interface could yet still be provided by a hosted system provider, overlaying and complementing existing site number and mobile number implementations - instead of replacing them completely.

The final interface, enabling existing applications with (the same) communications

As well as providing the primary interface for specific channel technology (show me all my received faxes, calls, emails) All the technology channels above ‘may be’ suitable to ‘enable’ an existing user interface, by line of business - Email a Contact, Fax a contact, Call a contact, record a contact, Text a contact

By way of a small example, although fax is a single technology channel above and sounds simple enough - fax integration can get interesting when requirements appear on the horizon to integrate into Exchange Outlook, or Lotus Notes, then to the telephone system (TDM or IP), then to unified messaging (forward the fax to a local machine) then SAP or Oracle line of business applications, then back end integration to hard copy Multi Function Devices and onwards archiving to the industry flavour EDM.

Nobody said it was simple.

At this point, Microsoft Sharepoint usually comes up in the conversation as a replacement interface to all the existing applications, so UC takes on another interface….and so it goes on, much to the user’s consternation.

There’s a play on words about ‘users’ being addicted to existing interfaces, but that would be cheap.

How to choose

Enabling lots of interfaces with a technology flavour tends to point towards best of breed technologies instead of an all-in-one UC solution.

Generalising: wide ranging applications just don’t go very deep in my experience, and ultimately they don’t generate enough ROI, and therefore sales, to justify the development resource to integrate into every interface (converge) that may be required in every industry.

All in one solutions, may be fine in small organisations where the user requirements are very focussed and not wide ranging.

In larger organisations with wider ranges of activites, each messaging ,or real time conversation, ‘technology’ should support the most possible interfaces you can think of, (and multiple interfaces concurrently).

This almost defines a best of breed requirement for each technology - particularly when in a sector that is in acquistion mode - and if you are adopting UC, it won’t be long before you’re in a sector likely to be acquisition minded according to some sources -technology adopting sectors see most acqusition.

So when you acquire a major competitor next month and have to incorporate whatever they are doing into what you’re already doing, you want multi-interface communication products.

It’s plain that in these unforseen circumstances, functionality needs to be priced in a modular fashion, according to the interfaces required and the inherent value of doing so (each interface is it’s own individual case for each technology).

So, am I proposing that in order to have fewer user interfaces, there is a need for more technology boxes and management?

It’s debatable I suppose, but probably.

I’ve seen non specialist technology suppliers integrating essentially as ‘lip service’ to get the original deal, and then support evaporates over the period, especially when the next app needs enabling, and you have to start looking to replace again.

I’m lucky enough to see the best of breed technology I supply stick over a very much longer period.

If I’ve missed anything then it’s likely to be mobile - but that’s a longer conversation.

It’s been a long day, but is there anything else I haven’t thought about?

When considering Speech Recognition as an interface for anything, just think about how it is to be used, by whom and where they’re calling from.

Having used Speech Recognition to access Exchange email, calendar, contacts, my CallXpress voicemail and corporate directory for the last two years (we had Exchange 2007 functionality 2 years early from AVST), I have to say that it has been a learning experience.

The first thing to relate is that it is often more comfortable as a solitary activity.

Somehow, you can hear your own voice change when talking to a machine.

It is the trepdiation that you’ll forget the right phrase to use, along with slower and louder speech, which means you end up sounding almost like ‘British person talking to foreign person’. Like an idiot in other words, and after a very short while, a self conscious idiot.

The worst thing is knowing that any slips will result in you having to repeat yourself.

Repeating oneself (no pun intended) is irritating to have to do, not to mention the fact it also attracts instant attention from anybody around you - and thus aptly demonstrates to your colleagues that even a dumb machine can’t be bothered to listen to you.

The funny thing is, most people wait for the machine to finish talking even if they know they can interrupt and they know what the machine is going to say. Such manners abound in the UK, even to inanimate objects that you can’t see!

If you are in a car on your own, this technology is fantastic, hands free and driving licence points saving and reduces home login time sorting through email because you deleted them somewhere near Oxford.

Trust me though, using it in public is about as cool as walking along with a £10 bluetooth headset over the ear.

This link is to a very neat article (thanks Alec) , which points out that the result of worker mobility and remote working, is a growth in conference calls and a demand for presence solutions.

There is a year’s worth of telephone call log data from Cap Gemini’s 9,000 strong organisation to base this on, and so excellent data to work with.

Replacement of ‘face to face’ meetings with an increase in telephone calls and audio conferencing is an obvious one, but also, it is argued, because 80 percent of calls end up in voicemail this is driving users to pre-book calls in advance, driving costs up through multiple calls into conferencing bridges from mobile phones.

Presence is described as bound to emerge as a key element of any provider of communications services.

Trouble is, I’m positive that the Telco and mobile companies don’t see a problem with growth of calls and conferencing! “More conference calls”, “paying for calls twice” must be music to the ears.

   Solid Gold

 In fact, any presence solution, resulting in less calls going to voicemail, and less calls overall, must be an unattractive proposition for the Telco or Mobile Operator.

It will probably fall on companies to implement their own Unified Commmunications solutions, (he says hopefully) making presence enabled, on net, conference calls free of charge, together with binding their own mobile calls to the enterprise to reduce costs.

Not proper Unified Messaging. But I’ve promoted Unified Messaging for so long - 12 years and counting, and I have to say that the market did recently seem relatively cooler towards the subject until Microsoft made their Unified Commmunications announcements.

So, Microsoft’s approach is a good thing, but still, from being a hot subject a few years ago, there is more shrugging of shoulders than there used to be.

I detect that attitudes stem from just how much email is being received by key people - and it is those very people who normally most benefit from productivity and increased levels of service that Unified Messaging can deliver.

I can see the thought process…”I get way too many emails, and you want to stuff my mailbox full of voicemail?” It’s a false argument, as everyone has to handle voicemail anyway, so their real point is that currently, voicemail is instantly recognisable and can therefore be prioritised.

The worst result of bad unified messaging is a ‘lumping’ of important voice messages into a sea of email dross

Therefore - to mitigate this issue for potential users, make sure your new unified messaging system distinguishes voicemail from email properly. This can be done in a few ways;

• When looking at your Outlook/Notes inbox, the voicemail should show a phone icon instead of a straightforward email envelope
• There should be a “This is a Voicemail” type statement in the subject field, and the number of the person who left you the message.
• Voicemail should have notifications by phone, and especially SMS (if no mobile email available) as an overlay to their email box or desk phone, to include the sender’s info! (helping users prioritise)
• When users dial in by phone, the UM system should separate voice, fax and email into separate queues that the user can choose to access. Most people will choose the voicemail queue to action first.

Better still, why not explore how to get rid of email overload, and start reducing inappropriate traffic through email. This is how I got interested in new media solutions

I take this quote from Business Week Article from a Dresdner Kleinwort Web 2.0 technology pioneer,

Thill says using the wiki, along with blogs and instant messaging, has cut down his e-mail use by at least 75%, and his colleagues have reported similar results. Now, he only needs to go a single wiki page to view all the key metrics for 80 Web sites monitored by his department. Whereas sifting and sorting that data from 80 sources could otherwise take weeks, he says, through the wiki, each user only needs “about 30 seconds” to plug in his or her data and make it immediately available to the whole team, all of whom are promptly notified by instant message or e-mail.

All apart from the email notification bit - amazing how few people use newsreaders - this would hugely ease life for the usersphere. I’m not sure 75% is achievable for all of us, but I seriously think 50% of my emails are inappropriate to the medium…sent and received.

I was reading the press release here, on Nortel’s website, and although the detail was very clear about Exchange 2007 and unified messaging and Nortel’s support of the Microsoft software, there was absolutely no mention of CallPilot UM. Is Callpilot the unloved stepchild perhaps?

Maybe that’s a question for Nortel’s CTO, now that he’s started a blog! Quite brave, and refreshing. I’m wondering if he has colleagues to help with the deluge of comments from existing customers that will need dealing with.

I can imagine communications applications vendors ceding the user interface to Microsoft, after all, it’s in the interests of the ‘user’ to have one main software interface for messaging, or real time communications for that matter. But I do question whether customers ought to throw years of back end application development away in favour of a shiny product marketing plan.

I saw a tender today asking for a voicemail solution, that would support the use of shared extensions - something that older products will have been quite used to from the 80’s…but surely new (microsoft?) product managers will have never imagined that sort of thing important? Ditto Voice forms, and distribution lists that only permit certain users to send to, etcetera etcetara - all run of the mill, unless you haven’t been in the business before. It’s going to take time. Also, why have a unified messaging system that only gets talking via the Nortel channel?

A shameless plug should go to AVST, that have supported any telephone system for years, plus any email system, but especially exchange (and Notes). Solid, reliable and they never take any obscure features away.

P.S Just in case I haven’t mentioned it before, it is a bugbear of mine, nobody needs VOIP to have unified messaging.