The use of sentiment analysis and similar techniques to predict or adjust the impact of marketing campaigns while they are in their embryonic state should allow for their more effective use.
Unified Communications has been a hot topic during the last few month with everyone, including me, making predictions for UC’s future. Some of these perspective have been going off in many directions though, so I thought I’d try to help define a vision of the flow going forward:
Part of that vision is that much of the UC deployment activities will take place in the Cloud: From the same Web Business article, Bennie Langenhoven, managing executive at Tellumat Communications, notes that there will be more talk about UC in the cloud in 2012 but asks “Will companies actually make the move?” I believe they will, since the technology capabilities have advanced so far and their applicability to business are so direct. There is a degree of complexity that may not be readily apparent, so a cloud approach can help minimize cost and leverage the understanding of others. Organizations need to at least incorporate the current capabilities of UC into their maintenance and investment plans, so that even if they don’t make the move right now their systems will be ready.
Hosted Unified Communications (one way to have cloud based UC) is still in a state of flux, leaving many organizations to ask: "What is it and how does it work?" Frost and Sullivan put out a white paper on the topic of hosted Unified Communications last year. There is also a HP/Avaya presentation with some interesting facts that cover quite a bit more areas than what you might think of when you hear UC and hosted environments. For example:
- HP + Avaya are now serving 426 of Fortune 500 clients with UCC Solutions.
- Gartner believes that HP is one of the few vendors that can fulfill all Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services (COPS) opportunities independent of size.
- HP + Avaya manage 500,000 SharePoint & 500,000 Office Communications Server (OCS) seats globally.
For organizations that are thinking about the internal use of social media (SoMe) techniques and the effect of UC, you might ask questions like: “Will social media and unified communications become more integrated? Will companies be forced to adopt UC so employees can communicate/collaborate via SoMe?”
I believe the answer is yes to both these questions as well. Intersection of the personalization side of SoMe with the enterprise business context can drive a much more flexible and powerful enterprise business model. The addition of mobile apps and the consumerization of IT adds fuel to the fire under UC. Organizations that incorporate this more dynamic view of the interaction between the enterprise and the employee (and automation) will have a significant advantage.
So I have to asked "What game-changing technologies do you see as having an effect on whether or not companies define/adopt a unified communications strategy?"
There is more about how HP is helping clients implement UCC solutions from the following resources:
You can download the report at right, or order a custom-printed copy of the report through HP MagCloud.com, a print-on-demand service created in HP Labs.
I didn’t think much about it when I first saw them, but there was an article in The Futurist recently that made me wonder about them again. The article talked about structuring a prize mechanism around them.
What really spurred my thinking was based on some of the posts I’d done recently about gamification and business. From that perspective, I looked at how the challenges were structured -- What was measured and why? Why were the constraints so tight? Was there a clear goal?
Then it made me think about if it is useful for businesses to define their own grand challenges to address. We live in a world of exponential change and potential, where the constraints that we have lived within may no longer exist. We need to start thinking about the opportunities differently.
The concept of having “grand challenges” may not require that they change the entire world. They just require a perspective on a different world. They may not even require they change the whole company. What are some grand challenges for IT going forward? How would you measure them? How would you award addressing them?
The greatest benefit to answering those questions would likely be that you put your vision down on paper in a way that can be quantified. We all know that IT organizations usually respond to that.
Near the end of the book the author talked about an example of how the current chess champion is not a machine or a person. Instead “the action moved to ‘freestyle’ competitions, allowing any combination of people and machines. The overall winner in a recent freestyle tournament had neither the best human players nor the most powerful computers. As Kasparov writes, it instead consisted of:
a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and 'coaching' their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. … Weak human +machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”
Although this was reported on a while ago, I still l believe this is an area where we’re going to see a great deal of effort in the near future. With the abundance of computing capability, and the optimization of resource usage based on their unique strength, whole new levels of productivity will be possible. It is clear that abstract pattern matching is an area where humans excel, and repeatable tasks are where automation a....
Organizations that recognize that and capitalize on the difference will excel.
