No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Getting Presence Right

We are at an important juncture in the development of the UC market. The economy shows some signs of emerging from its doldrums. Many vendors are offering solutions, and we're starting to see significant numbers of companies deploying UC capabilities. And, at last week's Gartner Symposium ITxpo, several sessions urged enterprises to work on their UC Strategy Plan as a critical, "Next Monday" action step. (See Marty Parker's discussion of Gartner's comments at NoJitter.)The juncture, however, is about the kinds of UC solutions that will be deployed, and Presence is one of the core, enabling issues.

For several years, our UCStrategies.com team has been discussing two primary deployment options: UC-U focused on user productivity, and UC-B focused on facilitating new business processes.

UC-U is easy to understand and envision. Just give everyone the tools and let them find more efficient ways to interact with co-workers. But, UC-B means thinking through where the communications bottlenecks and "hot spots" are, and how to incorporate UC functionality to overcome them. The best application opportunities probably accrue to a subset of the employees, so figure out which ones, and roll the capabilities out to them first. As our consulting engagements and numerous case studies have shown, UC-B often provides an order-of-magnitude greater benefits.

Central to this issue is Presence capabilities. If UC-U is all we are going after, then the Presence available in a "buddy-list" provides much of the information needed. I look up the name of my co-worker, see her status, and determine the best way to initiate communication.

In UC-B, however, we often don't need a named individual; we need someone with a particular skill set. In addition, there are many attributes besides "busy" or "on-the-phone" or "available" that will be more useful in real-life situations. Location, for example - where is the closest, available service technician to a customer with an urgent equipment outage? Or, if we are promoting collaboration, sometimes the best applications and the most challenging communications hurdles come when trying to reach outside the company to interact with a supply chain partner or directly with a customer.

When business processes use embedded communications capabilities to improve effectiveness, nuances in Presence status become even more important. Automated updates from a variety of systems and devices become increasingly important--laptops, desk sets and cell phones, location information (if I'm a doctor, am I in my office, on rounds or in the OR?), application programs I'm using, and much more. This means that different products from different vendors will need to interact and seamlessly exchange or provide continually-updated Presence information.

What about social networking tools? Facebook, Twitter and similar enterprise-oriented applications have lots of Presence-like information, as well as information about individuals' interests and skills. IBM Connections is one example of solutions whose capabilities include mining databases to acquire keep skills information and keep it current.

Finally, as Presence information becomes more widely available, we must develop rules and policies all linked to my "identity" (e.g., at work or at home) to help determine to whom and in what way I am accessible at a particular moment. And, as we get into exchanging information among systems, there will be increasingly important issues of privacy and security.

Here's the challenge and the juncture: The issues raised above are complex and solutions will require a lot of development, as well as cooperation among the different suppliers. Will these happen? If they do, case studies show there are significant benefits available from applications that incorporate a rich set of Presence capabilities. On the other hand, if enterprises gravitate to simpler UC-U implementations, and vendors only offer primarily minimally-enhanced, standalone, "buddy list" versions of Presence, UC may never reach its full potential.

At 3:15 PM on Monday, Nov. 2, at VoiceCon San Francisco, I'll be moderating a panel with managers from Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Voxeo exploring the issues surrounding Presence capabilities. Please join us and get involved in shaping the future! Or, let me know what you think by writing me at [email protected], or posting a comment on NoJitter.com.