Transforming the performance of your business using communications-enabled applications

What’s keeping your business waiting? Speed is a big deal for C-level people these days. When they talk to Nortel they tell us they’re worrying about business agility; about the need to make decisions faster; and about the costs of waiting for people to respond, get to meetings and share information. You’ve already automated. You’ve introduced self-service websites for customers and employees. You’ve got autodiallers and IVR. You’ve invested in fast networks, optimised your data centres and given everyone a mobile device. But it’s not enough. The problem is human latency.

Human latency
If you want to get hold of someone, they are often contactable via their desk phone, mobile phone, email or instant messaging. But what if your procurement system is waiting for human input? Does it have to put purchase orders in limbo, until a person thinks of checking the status? Trying to fix it by making the technology faster won’t help. When the delay is caused by waiting for human input, it doesn’t matter how fast your systems, network or equipment are.

This is just one example of process inefficiency due to human latency. The good news is that it can be addressed. If you communications-enable your applications or processes, you can add people back into the process precisely at the point where they can add value. In the example of the procurement system, if it were communications enabled, the system could proactively contact a person who’s qualified to sign off the purchase, then place the order, thereby making the business more agile and streamlined.

You can probably think of many business processes in your own organisation that would benefit from reducing human latency. Administrative processes, such as the purchase order example, are obvious ones, but there are operational ones too.

In hospitals, the business process or application that manages patient records could also be communications-enabled. The appearance of test results in a patient’s file would trigger an IM or phone call to the medical prime who could then take the appropriate action. Hospitals could also add enablement and location tracking to its people (to rapidly locate them) and assets, like expensive IV pumps. If equipment is moved out of its defined area an IM could be triggered and sent to the security team. This highly effective resource management improves patient outcomes and reduces the amount of expensive medical equipment the hospital needs to buy and maintain.

From operations right up to the boardroom, incorporating communications to processes and applications can have a significant impact. Having Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) can:

• increase efficiency to reduce costs
• reduce transaction times to make organisations more agile
• increase retention and loyalty by making customers feel more involved
• win more business through delivering better services and customer support

Efficient and scalable
How easy is it to reduce human latency within your own organisation? It’s straightforward enough if the applications or business processes have communications capabilities already incorporated, but many don’t. What’s needed is a way to integrate CEA – and service-oriented architecture (SOA) offers a simple and scalable framework for this and more.

SOA provides a framework for integrating and reusing your existing technology, applications and processes (including legacy ones), creating a cohesive system that is then easy to communications enable at either a single or a multiple applications level.

Many companies have already benefited from utilising SOA in this way and are gaining the resulting efficiencies. Just one example of this is that, in the past, companies had numerous independent systems containing customer information, all stored in different formats. Today, by using the SOA framework, they have been able to draw these systems together so they share a common database of customer information. Each system can now access the central database (rather than maintaining their own) and the company needs to make data changes in only one place. The net result is the reduction of the time it takes to make alterations as well as lowering the risk of inconsistencies which are an intrinsic risk when multiple systems are being touched. SOA can also be introduced where and when it’s most appropriate, enabling just those systems which will benefit from it most.

With SOA and CEA you can not only protect your existing investments but also increase your businesses ROI and agility.

Boost productivity and throughput
If you using an electronic workflow process via web services (e.g. a SOA architectural approach) and then communications-enable your applications, productivity and throughput go up a gear. Let’s consider an example. A financial services company can benefit by adding communications enablement to its loan applications process. Most banks have already automated their loans scoring processes, and now they can take it a step further. Whenever there’s an exception in the loan approval process that requires a loan officer to make a decision, they can receive an immediate instant message or phone call, dramatically reducing the time-to-decision. At the end of each stage of the process, the customer receives an alert by email or text message, so they don’t have to keep phoning in, leaving the company’s call centre to deal with other customers. The customer feels kept in the loop, which encourages customer retention. The same system communicates with both employees and customers, reducing duplication.

In this instance, human involvement has been incorporated into an automated process at the point where this can add value. Any process where people are needed for exception handling is an obvious candidate for CEA.

The same timeliness and richness of information can be used in life-and-death situations. In hospital emergency departments, a variety of staff need to be kept updated about the changing medical status and test results of patients. Today hospitals commonly use pagers, which are slow, have to be triggered by a manual phone call, and provide little information besides asking the staff to come to the emergency department. The Mobile Emergency Triage research group at the University of Ottawa in Canada has demonstrated how information from disparate systems, including legacy systems, can be collated and delivered to mobile phones, smart pagers and handhelds. Emergency staff get the most complete picture possible of the patient to support clinical decision-making, and off-site specialists can sometimes get enough information to contribute remotely to the patient’s care. SOA is the key architecture responsible for collating and delivering the information.

How presence and preference adds a further layer of value and reduces latency
Presence can also be leveraged by incorporating it into your business processes, as part of your CEA. Presence is, simply, the awareness of someone’s availability on a network. Business Instant Messaging services, as found in Microsoft OCS 2007 or IBM Lotus Sametime, detect users’ presence when they log in. Rich presence capability can also include the person’s whereabouts (location), what the person is doing (the context of the user, such as whether they are on a phone call or not, or signed into a particular business application), and what devices are available to the user (mobile phone, desk phone, PDA etc). By enhancing your business applications with key worker presence infomation you can significantly improve the time to progress your business.

Any system that has access to a presence application can use it to find out who is available, choose the best person or people to contact, and send them an alert using the most appropriate format, such as email, text message, IM or automated phone call. CEA and presence can also be combined with the skills-based routing that are common in call centres to route messages to the best-skilled and most available person, via the communications medium they’re using.

Presence can even have a role in employee safety. In the UK Nortel has developed a lone-worker application that uses presence, CEA and SOA to help employers fulfil their duty-of-care obligation to staff who have to work alone and thus do not have colleagues nearby who could help them if there is a problem. Examples are technicians working at remote sites and social or health workers who are often out in the community, working in a variety of environments.

Working with UK network service provider ntl:Telewest Business, part of the Virgin Media Group, Nortel created a monitoring application for social workers’ mobile phones, that used SOA to integrate many off-the-shelf software applications into a cohesive integrated solution for protecting staff. When a social worker is due to enter a client’s home, the presence application on their mobile phone automatically logs their approximate location, which it gets from the GPS tracker built into the phone. At the end of the appointment the social worker uses the phone to notify the system that they have left the client’s home; if the system doesn’t get a notification within a certain time, it automatically alerts their supervisor so that they can take appropriate action.

More prosaically, if a business meeting is cancelled or relocated at the last minute, a presence-enabled application could notify all the attendees via the device they’re using, for example by text to their mobile phone, rather than sending an email or voicemail that they wouldn’t pick up until they arrived at an empty meeting room.

This use of technology, to select and harness the most appropriate communication method, can be used for interacting with customers and other stakeholders too. But what do you do if you want to communicate outside of your business? The emphasis is here is slightly different: instead of considering a person’s skills and availability, their preferences need to be taken into account. Do they want customer support and marketing messages by text, email, chat or direct mail? A few retail banks have been doing this for years, offering summary statements and overdraft alerts by text or phone, but many businesses haven’t even tried out the opportunities for more varied customer communications such as podcasts, chat, Facebook and Twitter. With the integration of CEA you can enable your systems to communicate with your stakeholders in pre-determined ways, saving your business money, time and meeting the needs of your customers.

A hyperconnected world
Businesses today are faced with much complexity as they work to provide real-time access to information and people across a growing number of devices and applications (the hyperconnected world), and this is not going to change. Rather than adding to the complexity, however, Nortel has embraced this future and is making it simpler for customers to take this journey. Nortel ensures that every solution, service and product it presents to customers is (or already has been) communications enabled with the integration of presence, location, identity, conferencing, and other communication and network capabilities. This is also supported by strategic alliances in the middleware and business applications space with both IBM and Microsoft, so that whatever equipment our customers already have can be integrated and communications enabled

Business made simple, by Nortel
Nortel views CEA, leveraging SOA and web services, as key to addressing the challenge of hyperconnectivity and turning it into an opportunity for our customers. We make it easy to take traditionally IT-based applications and rapidly integrate communication functionality using SOA principles, so that there is significant reuse of existing components and services rather than rip and replace. Customers can do this simply and cost effectively.

At the heart of Nortel's SOA and Web Services solution is its Agile Communication Environment(ACE). ACE provides CEA capabilities for a wide variety of Nortel’s PBX and softswitch products. It also integrates with solutions from our partners, such as IBM Lotus Sametime, Microsoft OCS and Tandberg videoconferencing.

There may be other suppliers who will offer to communications-enable your business, but no-one has the comprehensive view of communications, the multi-vendor integration experience, the strategic alliances, the capability and – crucially – the service wrap that Nortel can provide to make this transition simple.

Next steps
So, whether you’re starting from scratch and require end-to-end consultancy and implementation or just need to fine-tune your communications enablement, Nortel can help you implement a solution which works best for your business in the most cost effective and efficient way.

For further information on Nortel visit www.nortel.com, for Service Oriented Architecture visit www.nortel.com/soa and for Nortel’s Agile Communications Environment visit www.nortel.com/ace. Alternatively you can contact Robert DeMontluzin, Leader Network Solutions and ICA Services, Nortel using the contact details on this web page.