The ability to modify presence status from a mobile device, using a consumer tool would add a tremendous amount of value.
I didn't get to attend the Siemens keynote presented by Mark Straton but Mark did walk me through the material the day before and it was great to see such a heavy emphasis on using social media as a way of enhancing unified communications. In past, VoiceCon presenters have danced around the topic of social media, talked about it as a generational thing and even characterized their current products as social media. For example, talking with IBM they were making the claim that SameTime is a social media tool, and they're right, it is a social media tool but I think the Siemens integration of Twitter into OpenScape is the first corporate tool that integrates in a consumer social media tool and then uses it to enhance the overall UC experience (see below).
I normally don't get all that excited about product demos, especially from stodgy German companies, but I have to admit this is pretty cool. The application takes the next step though and actually uses the Twitter feed to enhance the UC functionality. The example they gave was that if you were at lunch and you Tweeted that fact from your mobile device, the Tweet would be directed to OpenScape, which would recognize the text, understand the context and then change your presence status to "busy" and then direct any incoming calls to voicemail. Everyone could use this but this could be particularly valuable to those individuals that spend much of their time away from their desk. Yankee Group's latest research shows that over half the worker population spends more than 20% of the day way from the desk so the ability to modify presence status from a mobile device, using a consumer tool would add a tremendous amount of value.
The benefit of what Siemens has done is that it allows workers to use the consumer tools that they are already familiar with to interact with the corporate UC tools. I think too often vendors solve the problem by building corporate versions of the consumer tool which isn't as good as the consumer tool and doesn't reach the audience workers want--our own personal communities. Chat is a tool that comes to mind where every vendor has their own version of chat, some integrate with some consumer tools or each other and some don't. Even if they do, it's not always the easiest thing to get the tools to talk to one another and you often lose functionality, so as a worker, I'd prefer to stick with the things that I already use, which is a big part of the value that Siemens has brought here.
However, where our industry still needs to mature is helping companies understand how to use social media to change the way we work. There's not a CIO I talk to that doesn't feel that social media tools (and this has a very broad definition) are here to stay but they are unsure of exactly how to take advantage of them. A couple have figured this out but not many.
For example, I was talking with a book publisher the other day and they've started to change who they value as book reviewers based on Amazon ratings. Historically, "expertise" was very credential driven. You were a NY Times reporter that went to Stanford, etc so you must be good! However, this particular publisher feels the top Amazon reviewers are as or more valuable than the traditional ones. The Amazon reviewer may not have gone to an Ivy League school or work for a top publication but they have the power of the community behind them and that's what really counts today.
I've talked to companies that have actually taken this concept and driven it internally so if an employee is looking for a certain expert, then historically we go to the guy that's the VP of the group, ask that person and they direct us to someone that may or may not help. If an organization were to incorporate reputation based scoring based on user feedback, they may discover new "experts" based on the community.
The Siemens integration with Twitter would allow a worker to review some information or have a conversation with another worker and then may Tweet "The white paper from Joe Smith on virtualization was fantastic" out to the community and the system could interpret that and create a "positive" score for Joe Smith. Eventually the guy with more positive scores would be identified as the "expert". This makes managing expertise in an organization a very fluid process and could streamline the way we interact with each other.
I firmly believe the use of corporations inside companies is here to stay and I this topic to be an increasingly more important component of future VoiceCons. This was a great start but we've got a long way to go.The ability to modify presence status from a mobile device, using a consumer tool would add a tremendous amount of value.
