There's a critical need for UL to communicate constantly with customers about the status of the product testing process, as well as using communications systems to help internally track the process.

The centerpiece of my session on Presence here at Interop Las Vegas yesterday was a discussion with Christian Anschuetz, who's CIO of Underwriters Laboratories. In a lot of ways, UL is exactly the kind of company that we hear about that's supposed to be able to get a lot of business benefit out of Unified Communications, and Christian shared some ideas about exactly how that works at UL.UL, as most people know, is the company that certifies all kinds of products for safety--their stamp can be found on everything from home appliances to life jackets, Christian explained. Their customers are the companies that submit their products to UL for testing and certification, so there's a critical need for UL to communicate constantly with these customers about the status of this process, as well as for UL to communicate internally among its 7,000 employees, many of them engineers, to track the process.

So UL launched what Christian described as a "tens-of-millions-of-dollars initiative" to roll out UC to try and streamline this process. The initial stages are about streamlining the communications process itself--UL believes that presence can help cut down on the time suck of unnecessary emails and meetings--and again, time is of the essence when trying to move products through the UL certification process.

Christian's longer-term vision is to use presence tracking as an equivalent of the contact center dynamic--specifically, as a way to maintain status of, essentially, the "best available engineer" for a UL customer who contacts the company regarding a certification issue--in other words, the basic presence-tracking system needs to tie into the business process systems such that the system knows which engineers are assigned to that particular product or customer, what skill set is required to deal with the issue that's the subject of the current communications, and last but of course not least, who's available right now to help.

Significantly, Christian explained that he worked closely with UL's business leaders to develop this vision; there's no way he could have sold such a large project to his board without this kind of buy-in and active participation.

Similarly, he said that procuring communications systems to serve this vision was not simply a matter of issuing an RFP and checking off boxes. He told the vendor execs with whom he was sharing the stage: "You have to come in and understand what my business is doing." This may mean including SIs, consultants or channel partners as well as the vendor themselves understanding how the technology is to be used, he elaborated.

I asked Christian if simply improving business processes and separately updating or maintaining the communications infrastructure would have served the goals--or whether integrating the communications functions directly into the business process was an essential step. He responded that the communications integration was critical.

"We're going to connect more," he said. "We have to connect more."There's a critical need for UL to communicate constantly with customers about the status of the product testing process, as well as using communications systems to help internally track the process.