I have often written and talked about the third or strategic phase of IP telephony into which the communications industry is entering. The third phase of IP telephony products and services is based on a value proposition that enterprise customers will receive strategic value plus economic efficiency. The emphasis will now be on strategic value, which is wrapping communications around business process. Up until now the communication industry has been focused on delivering economic efficiency. This strategic phase promises to extract delay, both human and system from business process, increasing enterprise agility or the ability of a company to react to real time events or market changes.

Two new industry developments are propelling this new phase into market. First is the increased recognition of web services/SOA and SIP as the enabling technologies for developers to write communications-enabled business applications. Second, the largest software company on the plant, Microsoft, recently put its market weight and influence in the form of its Unified Communications ecosystem into the communications industry, marking a turning point that value will be created with software and services and not from specialized hardware.

In Lippis Report Issue 63: ?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ??¨Microsoft Says Game On to IP Telephony Players?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨?? we explored how the strategic phase will impact vendors/suppliers such as Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Intel, Nortel, etc. In this Lippis Report we´ll explore the changes that will take place in IT management and developers as the strategic value of IP telephony takes hold. In short it´s all changing.

IT Management: the new Architects of Communications

The implications of the strategic value phase are nothing short of business transformational. An important organizational ?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ??¨cultural?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨?? dynamic has been occurring and will accelerate as IP telephony enters into this strategic value stage. Since IP telephony solutions are deployed over Ethernet switches and routers while communication managers offer signaling services and telephony features on standard computing platforms, organizations have had to re-think the roles and responsibilities of IT and telecommunication departments. IT management is able to easily incorporate server-based telephony platforms into its existing server and storage management and operations. Further, since VoIP travels over Ethernet switches and routers, network managers have naturally taken over the responsibility of design, support and maintenance of the IP telephony transport solution.

Many organizations have found that the skills and resources of traditional telecommunications managers are increasingly being narrowed to that of dial plan design and service provider management. Thus many telecommunication managers and directors focused on transport management have been either re-trained or are in advisory roles to IT management or business division managers. In short, the role of the telecommunication director or manager is in flux. Enter the third phase of IP telephony and web services, where IT management will be empowered to develop applications without the need to understand complex communication protocols and you have a further diminishing value of the telecommunication manager´s role in corporate communications.

Here Come the Millions of IT Developers

With web services being the new programming interface for IP telephony, communications programming will no longer be the province of an elite and relatively closed community of programmers. In fact, a general purpose IT developer with web services skills will soon be able to program communications just as well as those with years of communications programming experience. This new emphasis on business communication applications based upon web services/SOA and SIP will further shift IP telephony architecture, design and purchase decisions toward IT management and business stake holders and away from telecommunications management and communications developers.

Business communications applications means a development focus on business process alignment with communications. Business process is either structured or unstructured. For example, structured business process could simply be the levels and number of signatures required to open a purchase order, or the human resources life cycle that tracks an employee from hire to retire. The links of a supply chain or levels of a distribution system and the communications which control them are structured business process with strong cause and effect consequences.

The hundreds of e-mails, voice calls and instant messages per day which most knowledge workers generate and respond to is a less structured form of business process, but it is process. Office productivity communication flows, be they voice calls, instant messages, voice mail, faxes, e-mail, conferencing, etc., are all examples of unstructured business process. When you´re communicating you´re engaged in either a structured or unstructured business process. Unfortunately, unstructured means a loose coupling or alignment between communications and business process. This is about to change with Microsoft´s UC focus on the desktop and its potential result of bringing order to unstructured business process. These silos of v-mail, e-mail, fax, phone, IM, etc., will give way to integrated communications extracting the delay associated with reaching people, increasing the speed of workflow and business process.

At the epicenter of both structured and unstructured business process is collaboration or the ability for employees, partners and suppliers to move workflow and satisfy customers. The movement of information over converged IP networks has been a boon to corporate productivity. Nearly every corporation in the global economy has benefited from IP networks as they have enabled the extraction of delay, both human and system, in business process.

In business process it´s not just humans who have to engage other humans in communication to move work product forward; it´s the inability of humans to react to situations in microseconds. Communications-enabled business process can. For example, a triggered event that automatically engages the right personnel or applications or an alert that automatically puts in motion a business process to address a situation is communications-enabled business process. Communications-enabled business process can be event driven with an ability to sense a business scenario, which triggers an event and the ability for the enterprise to respond in real time, if required. Events could be man-made or natural disasters, market changes, customer requirements, etc.

Deeply embedding communication into the business process offers the following value: improves knowledge worker productivity, enables the business to respond in near real time to situations, and enables Business Communication-Activity Monitoring or (BCAM). Creating a business application enabled by communication for situational context is at the heart of IP telephony´s third phase. A rules-driven communication environment, which is tightly linked into business process, will enable enterprises to realize strategic value from IP telephony solutions. Read differently, this means improved response time, market share and profitability.

So what are the killer applications? The answer is there is no single killer application, but many smaller, customized applications that in their totality are the killer application. Many enterprises have started their own application development efforts by extracting delay associated with unstructured business process with click-to-call and click-to-conference tools while in the process aligning communications with business needs. Just like IT focused on automating structured business process such as transaction processing over the past forty years, removing delay to organize knowledge workers into conferences will be one of the first applications to be automated and integrated into business process. The ability to improve communications between organizations and remove impediments in the value chain is of high strategic value to most concerns.

Open IT Programming Interfaces For Communications

Just like mainframes gave way to mini-computers, which gave way to PCs connected on LANs, the PBX has given way to IP telephony. Mainframes were expensive and hard to program which extended the time for application development. Mainframe-based IT application development projects were often late, over budget and didn´t meet business objectives due to their complicated programming interfaces. Client/server-based applications were easier to write and often developed by IT within business units. The result of this shift from centralized to distributed application development was quicker time to market and application development being conducted closer to the business which increased the project´s potential for meeting business requirements. Clearly the client-server model has given way to internet technologies and increasingly, to web services as well.

IP telephony is being folded into, and over time will be controlled by, web services. With SIP and web services business communications applications are being written by IT departments tightly linking communications to business process. The change in programming interfaces to one that is friendly to IT departments will both hasten application development and link communication applications to business stakeholders. With programming access available to a larger developer community, rapid innovation and creativity of new communications-based business applications will also flourish as the cycle of proprietary to open has shown before.

Transition Toward The Strategic Value Stage

With IT empowered to mold, shape and inject communications into business process, IT can play a major role with executive management in constructing an agile and customer-facing corporation. Communications-enabled business applications add a new dimension to a variety of business related activities including person-person, system-person, and system-system communication-driven activities. Businesses with communications-enablement will differentiate themselves from other non-communications-enabled businesses. Daily decisions are made by executives based upon market/competition/disaster events. Executive decisions put an organization in motion and often result in a series of downstream decisions, facilitated by the enterprise´s communications infrastructure. The more efficient and linked the communications system is with the business the more agile the enterprise. Unfortunately, businesses could not realize a 360 degree communications view of their business until now. Communication will be driven by the rules of the business in this new world.

2007 will be the year in which the third phase of IP telephony starts to take hold. The business efficiencies that can be gained are enormous and over time can potentially put the economy on another productivity growth curve. So the question is, are you ready? Consider the following:

1. Have you identified your top ten business processes?
2. Have you quantified and qualified the value of speeding up those business processes?
3. Is there a focus group made up of IT and business executives to review business process and explore how communications will add strategic value?
4. Are your IT resources organized to take advantage of the strategic phase?
5. Does your IT organization have the right skill sets to implement communications enabled business process
6. Have you selected your strategic IT vendors to assist in the building of communications enabled business processes?
7. Do you have the right tools to manage and monitor networked applications?
8. Have you transitioned to an IP telephony system?
9. Is your network ready for converged services?

The above are but just a few questions that IT and business managers need to start asking if they are going to be ready to take advantage of the benefits associated with communications enabled business applications.

Posted 18 September 2006 at 7:45 am under Lippis Report, Unified Communications & Comm.-Enabled Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.