Conversationware

Why spend time, sweat and tears writing your predictions for the coming year.

Relax in your armchair instead, with your google persistent search turned on for the first week in January, and peruse until you find some you agree with - then link to them.

My interest is in how communications can help with business, in all senses of the word and to my mind, the best on the subject is a great article by Shomik Banerjee summarising 2007 and looking at 2008 for enterprise communications. Really good job.

Of course, I have to comment, or it’s not worth linking

Shomik doesn’t say if the headlined views below are in order of importance, or likelihood;

• A) PBX is passé, ‘UC’ is the buzzterm
• B) The Focus Market for Enterprise Telephony is Shifting to SMB
• C) Enterprise Mobility is ‘Hot’
• D) Collaboration Gains Fresh Impetus
• E) SOA and Web Services Gain Traction
• F) Open Source and Open System Gain Mindshare

In terms of market impact, I would have them in roughly the reverse order.

(maybe not by the end of 2008 though)

Another good read is by Charlie Bess on the EDS fellows ‘next big thing blog’. I like the Green IT idea, and I guess this is just an acceleration of the virtualization movement, which has been manic paced in any event.

Feel free to link to others in the comments!

I caught sight of a post by chip griffin, arguing that the stuff he saw at the defrag conference - which seems to be a collaboration technology show - wasn’t compelling enough to replace email.

Email is simple and ubiquitous, so why replace it. I think that’s a contentious point - and probably purposefully so. These bloggers eh, always stirring the pot. As if I didn’t come across his missive through RSS.

But Chip looks from the point of view of a user - and I happen to agree with that point. Complicated isn’t good.

My own view is that email is great when it’s one to one, and when the extent of the interaction is easily defined. Question - Answer - Done.

But Email can go horribly wrong where there are multiple parties, or where an ongoing conversation is required.

So - what problems are there with email? Here’s a few I can think of, feel free to suggest more.

1. Where can I look to see progress around a topic that involves a few of us - where can anyone look to see progress? I know….lets send another email and ask.
2. Email is fraught with the following problem: If I email you with a  question about the project and you haven’t responded - who’s responsibility is it that the action didn’t get done? It’s mine of course….but email blurs the lines and makes it difficult. “He didn’t get back to me” is something you hear over and over
3. Email hides what is important, and gives you what is urgent (your newest emails) instead.
4. If someone joins the conversation late, where can they look to get up to speed

Have I missed anything?

In short, I don’t think the email problem is actually a myth, but just what we do about it isn’t exactly clear. I thought it was going to be SharePoint - but from what I read, the jury is still out there too.

There are no shortage of new innovative companies looking at the issue. Anything topic based catches the eye. From that acquisition of Parlano, perhaps Microsoft still think there is more work to be done around collaboration too.

At the moment, presence is a bit like opening a christmas package to find some bits and a pot of glue.

And, there are pieces missing. Even when you’ve been using presence for a while, something just doesn’t feel right.

Here’s the thing -

I don’t care who you are (sorry mother), there are times when I don’t want to talk to you, at that moment.

Conversely, it might vary, depending on why you need to talk to me….I’m becoming a master of the obvious.

IF THEN EQUALS

So - presence ’status’ should be conditional upon what you want to talk to me about

Send an invitation to converse (I know that’s what a ringing phone is), but send it with the subject - and if you get an affirmative response, ‘WE’ can then go about deciding on the best method and time to do it.

By WE, of course I mean clever software that AUTOMATICALLY detects when we both can and would do it.

The only additional fluff could be with the level of urgency, or importance - I’m not sure which, but probably the latter -  to be attached by both the invitee and respondee to the subject, and that should be 1,2,3 or maybe 4.

The final requirement is that when we do get to speak, all of the items we’ve hitherto agreed to speak about are listed on a screen, which means we can make notes and either tick them off or agree to invite someone else into the subject.

The lower the combined importance numbers, the higher in the list the subject goes.

You know what, it makes much more sense than ‘ringing’ someone without knowing beforehand whether its a good subject, or time.

I do have deja vu at this point. So maybe this is something I’ve already seen - but if so, then it needs more publicity so that I can remember it better…..so link back here.

I’m minded of the following.

Albert Einstein quote - If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut

When we speak, in business, we are (usually) looking to achieve something.

UC technology helps us achieve more stuff, allowing us to speak to each other when we’re not in the same room, and by giving us extra tools like email attachments and multiperson multimedia conferencing to speed up the process.

When we communicate, if we can’t instantly move things on to completion, then we’re entering into an ongoing conversation…..and that could span days, months and even years.

These days, we have more of them, and they include more people

The thing is, in itself, UC doesn’t help all that much with the better organising of our multiplying conversations (meaning activities in common) - it more often means we just have more and richer ways of having them.

Even with all the tools being easier to use, you realise that the conversations still have to happen, and that there is loads still to do. You often can’t do more than one thing at once (fellas), so we have to get smarter, or at least incorporate tools that make us look that way.

For instance, Google desktop search makes me look good, for free, so thanks goes to them.

Similarly, being able to see at a glance which conversations have moved on whilst you were busy, or absent, and more usefully, being able to dip into colleagues’ previous conversations, is the promise of Parlano - which is soon to be incorporated into the Microsoft promise too blog by Nick Fera, the boss. Congratulations to them . I’m looking forward to seeing that as part of OCS.

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.

There is more to being effective than just being efficient.

It’s been at the back of my mind that we ‘communication technology people’ are still only part way through making life easier, helping us all contact people more quickly and efficiently, and reducing the cost of doing so.

But once that job is finished, how are users helped to be more EFFECTIVE once the conversation is in progress.

A far more elegant description of the difference between efficient and effective can be found in this article from the boss of Parlano

Nick muses that we lack an ROI model for this collaboration technology, but it seems obvious that getting a purchasing decision should be easier once the tools to measure effectiveness are in place.

But, perhaps instead of tools we just need a new breed of business analysts who enjoy a challenge, whilst being given a full remit to change by those in charge.

Lots of people are working on this aspect of micro and macro productivity and Parlano have an interesting proposition which blurs the line between real time and messaging with group productivity around topics.

When I chose the name for this blog, it was partly because the word conversation does allow for extended communications around a subject over a sustained period via multiple modes and channels.

To sum up then, Unified Communications is just where we start, to enhance and speed connectivity…and as I comment, we can lead the horse to water more quickly, but effectiveness will need yet further ‘tools’. 

I admit to being interested in such toolkits, before I get any comments from colleagues, many thanks.

Click to Dial allows you to locate a number in some contact database and call it, but if the user is then handling the ongoing conversation on their telephone device - this precludes all other potential channels of communication - and it misses the point.

By Contrast, UC is about delivering a single user interface for Real Time Conversations - and these conversations need handling tools. See the picture below.

We’re all getting used to conversations being started in any of multiple modes, including IM, Telephone, Audio, Web, Video and Desktop conferences. The challenge is a consistent and single interface to handle the conversation

We might want to

• put people on hold
• mute them
• invite someone else either by IM phone or email (or by clicking their name)
• Consult with another colleague separately on a different channel 
• drop a specific person
• start a desktop share or make a presentation
• Record the whole thing

The tool also needs to do two things - show whether someone is at their desk, or not, and show when they’re on the phone (that defines presence for me). The first one is simple, the second can be approached in any number of different ways.

The ultimate goal is to share this information with people that you choose, in any organisation and whatever phone device you happen to be using. 

Have you seen a single interface to handle all of those conversations? Not many people have as yet, but it doesn’t stop them claiming to have a UC solution

My Teamwork from Alcatel Lucent has the best conversation GUI that I have seen and it also solves a lot of the problems that desktop installed solutions would have by being completely browser based, meaning that anyone can join in with any channel of communication.

It also covers a little of the other two aspects of UC, by which I mean incoming call handling and application integration.

Del.icio.us is so simple, the potential usefulness passes you by at first. It’s the sort of service that makes you wish you’d spent more time reading the instructions six months ago when you first signed up.

A little introduction here, if you don’t know it.

See a webpage, click a button in your browser, save it with tags, and always find it again. All that useful stuff you can’t remember where it was? Not any more…very cool.

Using a reader, and subscribing to what colleagues and family find interesting, that’s a very simple way to reduce overloaded email inboxes!

However, if there is any element of competitive intelligence involved, then why not keep it in the family and install (10 users free), bookmarking, specifically for within the company.

Cogennz collective intelligence is a British Web 2.0 product, good show, and obviously therefore a step ahead