Transcript for UCStrategies Experts Discuss CEBP

Marty Parker: Hello everyone, this is Marty Parker with UCStrategies and ucstrategies.com and today our topic for our podcast is Communications Enabled Business Processes or CEBP, as they are called in the industry. Now, CEBP is a primary example of UC for business processes – we call it UC-B at UCStrategies, and it delivers major business values, such as labor savings and asset savings, expense savings, margin improvements, and profits. Or in the government case, lower spending and maybe lower deficits. It delivers all those things by changing how the business is done. That is different from UC user productivity (UC-U), which is putting UC tools on the desktop and letting all of our creative people and employees do their job better. UC-B actually goes in and specifically changes how the work is being done.

We have posted a lot about CEBP on UCStrategies over the years. We put a new post up today (Finding the Business Value of CEBP) that you can take a look at talking about this and Don Van Doren is going to talk a little bit more about the seven categories of CEBP improvements that we have identified. There are number of case studies that have come out on CEBP at Enterprise Connect, where we had 12 vendors on the UC Options - Who Offers What? panel, 30-odd case studies that they brought to the panel were on CEBP. You can also see these showing up on the vendor’s websites and at Gartner symposiums. Each year for the last two there has been a dedicated session on CEBP at Gartner, based on case studies with specific examples.

Now the list of players in CEBP is very similar to the list of players in UC, which is good. Desktop applications and vendors, Microsoft with Lync and IBM with Sametime, are both particularly strong due to the rich middleware suites that come with their UC products. Microsoft APIs are built in. IBM Sametime has APIs and integrates with – actually, Microsoft Lync also integrates with the Microsoft Back Office suite, such as IAS and IBM Sametime with Back Office, such as Websphere. The IP-PBX voice and video vendors – Cisco with Cisco Unified Communication Manager and Cisco Unified Application Environment, Siemens with OpenScape, with its rich APIs and Interactive Intelligence with their Interactive Process Automation, IPA, which is getting a lot of good marks, Avaya with their Agile Communication Environment, and NEC with their Spherical Suite. Basically, you can find lots of places where the software is available to produce communications enabled business processes for your business and your operation.

We also see the mobility players moving in this direction with RIM; maybe we will see more with Droid and Apple. And some of the carriers have business divisions that work on CEBP and we also see the application players, like SAP and Salesforce.com and other vertical players contributing into this space. It may sound funny, but they are actually building communications right into their products from the start. Some cloud-based, some premise-based, but you have those built in to make it easier to communicate. So with that, I am going to call on Don Van Doren and ask Don – what do people do with CEBP, Don?

Don Van Doren: Thanks very much, Marty. Well as you have pointed out in your introduction, what we see in our consulting work is that the processes or the activities that companies frequently use unified communications for often sort themselves out into those two use cases. That is, individual productivity – what we UC-U, and the business process side – UC-B. It's real interesting, as we dive deeper into these use cases, we see seven different ways that solution scenarios or applications frequently come up and let me just quickly run through those.

First, is sort of optimizing resource utilization – using tools such as presence to identify the most appropriate and available resource, whether it's a person or even a piece of equipment and that kind of thing can really improve processes.

Secondly, accelerate transaction completion. Lots and lots of transactions within organizations encounter delays or potential for errors as information is transmitted and unified communications capabilities have been exceedingly effective at getting rid of those delays. For example; waiting for information from someone else or waiting for somebody to approve a particular step in a process.

Third, increase notification precision. What we find is that the loss of activities within organizations that can trigger the need to alert a team member to some particular required action. And unified communications can manage and escalate and track and log these kinds of alerts and so that can be extremely important.

Fourth, improve contact success. Increasingly because of all the different devices and contact methods and telephone tags, etc., it's very hard sometimes to get a hold of the person you need and yet unified communications tools, such as presence and federation, identifying alternative contacts, or other non-realtime options, can really provide communications enhancements to help make contact success more effective.

Fifth, automated communications processes. What we find is that many communications within the enterprises are repetitive or part of a workflow and these communications can often involve pretty complex rules. Unified communications can automate those things. Put it within an application and implement situation-dependent rules for contacting the right person at the right time.

Sixth, speeding information delivery. One of the things we’ve seen a lot of in our consulting area is that there needs to be ready access to the information and yet often that means calling up somebody or asking them to retrieve information or provide that data. Unified communications tools really combine communications with information access to enhance or even automate the delivery of that kind of information.

And finally, and perhaps the biggie in a lot of organizations, is enhancing collaboration effectiveness. What we are finding is that increasingly collaboration, especially among diverse project teams, is often a critical success factor. What we are seeing over and over again is that unified communications can provide a variety of tools that enable easier and more effective collaboration. Improvements in conference calls for example, or managing shared documents, or tracking review cycles, or new kinds of ways to record information, record conferences, or persistent workspaces where people can really get things done that are communications enabled. And moreover, and what is really critical, especially in going forward I think, is that these capabilities can extend not just within an organization, but also to external customers and partners and suppliers. So there are an awful lot of different ways that I think this is going on.

Marty Parker: Well thanks Don for that and we’re finding CEBP isn’t just at the desktop, it can be mobile and anywhere in the enterprise and Andy Zmolek is going to comment a bit for us on how mobility and CEBP are complimenting each other, Andy?

Andy Zmolek: Thanks Marty. You know, the first thing that I thought of as I was hearing Don’s list, was at least half of those have a direct impact in terms of how deeply integrated CEBP is with the mobile device and as we get mobile devices that are getting smarter and more able to deal with all the different modalities of UC, we’re going to continue to see the value proposition of CEBP being really entangled with that of the mobile device. How well does that mobile device expose UC functionality? How well does it expose the critical information needed with CEBP-related UC flows? I think up until now, most of the UC and CEBP vendors have assumed that the mobile device is a fairly – I will say more terminal-like and your terminating an SMS or you are terminating a voice call. And I think as the sophistication and capability of those endpoints, both in smartphone form factors and tablet form factors, allow you to do more, and frankly, since those mobile devices are going to be certainly available much more often than desktop devices, just because of the practical realities of what people take with them and where people are that need to make critical decisions, they are often traveling. You are going to see an increased emphasis on how do CEBP solutions work with mobile devices, how do the dominant platforms, which these days certainly what you are seeing is both the iPhone and the Android platforms have taken a huge chunk of the market share and look to be the dominant platforms going forward. How do those integrate fully with the UC and CEBP backend?

The interesting part of this is, how do you allow something that was originally starting out as more of – I will call it terminal mode communication – is becoming something more. How do you enable at the endpoint the interactivity to be able to perhaps start out with one kind of modality and seamlessly switch over to a more appropriate type at the suggestion of the end user and have the CEBP backend be completely transparent and seamless in that handoff. I think that is one of the more interesting problems in terms of how you get the ecosystem to work together to solve what are obvious business needs.

And in terms of adoption, I think what we are going to see is as quickly as those capabilities are exposed on mobile devices, be that through applications or through something deeper, that’s going to be taken up and used – it's such a natural thing. With that, we can hand this off to David, who’s going to cover vertical solutions.

Marty Parker: Yeah, thanks Andy, this is Marty still speaking. David I think as Andy says, it's just going to be a wonderful opportunity to see these things adopted to specific verticals, because CEBP certainly is about business processes that vary by vertical, what would you tell us about that?

David Yedwab: Thanks Andy and Marty. Actually I’m going to come at this from a slightly different perspective and it's the perspective that says one of the things technology tends to do is it commoditizes everything it addresses. We’ve seen that across a whole bunch of business processes like ERP, automated manufacturing, etc., and as we get more CEB-entrenched into role-based or functional or organizational kinds of communications, like the taxonomy that Don outlined, I believe we’re going to see the technology begin to commoditize and the one sweet spot in that is going to be the ability to reengineer the business process – the business process that generally is vertically oriented that makes an auto manufacturer a whole lot different than a pharmaceutical manufacturer, that the real business value is improving those business processes. And the technology becomes an enabler of improving that business process.

I would like to give one sort of general example of how an awful lot of small businesses can all be improved by a very simple application and one that I originally heard about five or six years ago, from the now Mitel-acquired InterTel, which was an integration of an IVR callout, with Outlook Calendar to verify appointments—for the car dealer, for the beauty parlor, for the medical practice, for a whole bunch of small businesses that depend upon appointments. That was a neat innovation five or six or seven years ago, but now everybody is doing it. I know I don’t go through a week without getting three or four calls to remind me about my appointments for that week and I am sure a lot of us have found it that way. But that ultimately provides us with an opportunity and an opportunity for the channel, who becomes knowledgeable about specific business processes that need to be redesigned and improved that UC can help with. And it is that channel opportunity to learn the vertical processes, to learn the specific business process, and to teach and train the user company on how to improve that process and affect the business – affect their own business – that will never be commoditized as we go forward. And I believe that is something that we need to recognize, think about, and see if we can extend those verticalizations across more horizontal and role-based communications enabled processes. But again, it's enabling and fixing the business process to work better. With that, let me turn it back to Marty.

Marty Parker: So David, you are really saying that just like happened in the computing industry a couple decades – over the last couple decades – that this increasing commoditization on the one hand could just be turned into cost savings until it goes to zero, but you are saying that if enterprise IT groups and value added resellers are astute, they will take some of that commoditization savings and convert it into these applications, is that right?

David Yedwab: Yeah, it's applications that drive the specific business. I know one of the high runner applications that we heard about is the pharmaceutical company that said they were able to bring a drug to market six months earlier by having better communications processes. Now, in the pharmaceutical industry, with billions of dollars worth of revenue from a drug, and 16 years or less in patent production, bringing a drug to market six months earlier can mean billions of dollars. Now that specific application doesn’t play across too many industries or too many businesses other than the pharmaceutical industry. And clearly enabling that kind of an application for that specific vertical is not something that is going to be commoditized by Moore’s law and some of the other drivers of technology.

Pam Avila: I’d like to add on to David Yedwab’s comments, and mnd mention that I heartily agree that CEBP puts the channel or channel members into a very strong position, because CEBP basically will never be commoditized. And it gives the channel great opportunities in the vertical industries, it lets them create a solution that can be replicated across a vertical market, and then once it’s developed for one customer, they can just replicate it again and again and this gives them significantly higher margins, because they’re not putting in the hours, or the time to create a new solution every time. And also as in David’s example of the IVR call integrated with the Outlook calendar, the solution is actually something that is applicable not only for a specific vertical, but can be appropriate for multiple vertical markets as well, allowing a channel partner to leverage their knowledge. Most important of all, CEBP solutions allow the channel partner to position themselves as knowledgeable about business and a problem solver, rather than just someone who is trying to sell equipment or hardware.

Marty Parker: Good point, thank you very much. Well, Samantha Kane had some thoughts about the case studies for CEBP, in fact she had a specific one to mention, and I think that just makes our point that the case studies, the evidence we’re seeing from published experiences and even the unpublished ones, are really going to be our guide. What would you say about that, Samantha?

Samantha Kane: Thanks Marty. My case study is an actual in-progress project and it's to do with the utility industry. We picked a very important environment in that particular utility and it was storm management and the storm rolls in pretty quickly. And one of the key areas that you have in a utility for storm management, besides high volume overflow technology to kind of capture the outage footprint of where that outage grid is, is that you have a 24/7 communication command center that involves about 20 different skill sets and two different shifts, because it's 24/7. And so what we’re actually doing is working with that communication command center to automate the different processes of communication. One of those is the actual communication in press releases and who they have to go to, to get approved before they get out. And we are in the process of automating that environment. We are automating all of the different folks that have to come in and be part of that communication command center and feedback information.

There are really three different kinds of models for storms, and there’s the six-hour, there is the 48-hour, and then anything past 72 hours, that whole CEBP process changes completely and has a completely different type of skill set, management approval, distribution acknowledgement, have to change, so that CEPB process changes as well with it. And then it starts also getting involved with complaint management folks and how those things are handled. So if you think about what we’ve just described, we have accomplished resource utilization, we have accelerated the transaction completion, we’ve increased the notification presence out into the field, we’ve improved a contact success, both internally and externally, with the commissions and the press. We’ve automated the communication process, we’ve actually sped up the information delivery out to the field and communicate simultaneously with everyone, so that they are not duplicating their effort, and we have certainly enhanced the collaboration effectiveness of the whole organization and I think that the results of this, when the testing is completed, will identify savings of over eight digits with this one application. So I wanted just to share that with you. It's a great success story.

Marty Parker: It's a fabulous story, Samantha, and it really shows where delays and errors and rework of the past, the way that communications was done in the past, can be overcome with these new tools. Great example. And so maybe just to wrap up, I am going loop back to Don Van Doren and ask – what would you say, Don, to our listeners about the best way to implement CEBP? What comments would you have?

Don Van Doren: Thanks Marty, very much. I think it's really interesting to observe how these solutions are getting implemented in the industry. Throughout this conversation, we have been mentioning this dichotomy between sort of UC-U and UC-B – individual productivity under UC-U and then business processes under UC-B. Frankly, a lot of companies perhaps influenced by – what I will call a myopic vendor view – have taken a rather narrow view of unified communications and some of its capabilities. And because of that, they’ve just started with sort of a UC-U understanding and deployment. That is, a sort of broad deployment across the entire organization – you know perhaps as part of the implementing a new telephony switch or maybe upgrading all the desktop software. And in that case, what’s happening is that the UC-U capabilities are available across the board to everyone. But our research and a lot of case studies have shown that the benefits are significantly greater with the UC-B approach and there are some enterprises that understand the kind of impact on processes that UC-B can offer and they systematically go after those—the kinds of things that for instance Samantha was just talking about. One insurance company client of ours looked at the claims processing area and came up with 63 different communications bottlenecks that were going on and were able to fix two-thirds of those with just a couple of UC interventions.

So what’s happening I think, is that people are looking at figuring out how we take steps to identify specific opportunities within business, just as Samantha mentioned with the storm management activity, and now really figure out how unified communications can make a difference in how work gets done. I think that is really important. But the critical part as seems to me, is that for all those organizations out there that have just broadly deployed unified communications as sort of a UC-U productivity improver, they really need to go back and look hard at how they can take advantage of this widespread capability now to really start developing and publicizing what their UC-B opportunities are. And I think that is sort of CEBP emphasis that is going to be really important for organizations going forward. Back to you.

Marty Parker: Thanks Don for that and so with that, we’ll wrap up our podcast for today. I hope that you’ve gotten the message from all of our UC experts that communications enabled business processes are a dynamic, important factor in the unified communication industry. That enterprises are implementing CEBP applications. That in many cases they are specific to an individual business process, such as Samantha Kane described to us in the utilities industry, and often specific to that vertical, as both Samantha and David suggested. And as Andy indicated, are going to be showing up in richer and richer formats on mobile devices as well as at the desktop.

So with that, we will thank you for listening and wish you good luck on CEBP.