The ICT Optimist

No Unified Experience:

The idea that people would benefit if they could interact with complex multi-modal communications systems as if they were a single unified entity.

The delivery of each element of this rich communications experience comes from very different vendors that are generally hostile or competitive to one another. If your vision of rich communications involves audio, video, immersion, information flow and sensory stimulus, then that vision expects a single way to experience such a rich interaction. Today the technology is structured where each of these elements comes from different vendor ecosystems. Each ecosystem pursues different paths to market and technical delivery. The standards bodies they participate in are generally as fragmented as the vendors are. Each vendor has a real fear of being relegated to just a component so each presents a new and improved user interface for their part of the system.

Unification cannot come from a set of fragmented systems that all want to be the primary interface for the users. Additionally many of these vendors disagree on the value of the unified system. For example, the video providers (Polycom, Tandburg/Cisco, LifeSize) believe that the ideal experience is high definition video and all other options are a sacrifice. Alternatively, Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and others with a more voice and messaging centric view believe that HD video is interesting but not really as important as a unified client. Beyond that each vendor advocating unification is advocating their unified client which inherently does not support or even acknowledge the presence of other tools and definitely not other unified clients. At best the vendors have agreed on basic interworking of communications methods but no real progress has been made in addressing the need to have one experience across vendors in the broader communications environment.

What is needed is a new way to interact and control the various tools and systems that are used in the presence of communications. In fact, there is little need to have one universal phone or video system or even messaging tool. Rather there is a critical need to have one uniform interface to control and orchestrate the combined services that these tools could present to users. To achieve a true unified experience, two new technical elements are needed.

1)      Identity Resolution: A common way to unify identity is critical as part of the vision is interaction based on human identity. The challenge today is that identity is fragmented and even though all of the sub elements exist, a unified view of those parts is lacking. The closest we have today is the corporate directory where names, groups, internal phone numbers and other data is consolidated. Unfortunately that tool is lacking visibility into external identities (your IM address, external email, social networking identities, and personal phone numbers). Even if you added these to the corporate directory you  still lack an awareness of which of the identities would be best used to accomplish a specific task. A better approach to this problem is to accept that identity is fragmented and that identity resolution is the key task. Identity resolution is the idea that when you wish to reach a group or person, you provide that intent by name (e.g. call John Doe) and a system with awareness of the various identity bases and systems interacts with them all to present a complete view of John Doe. Additionally since that system is involved in the ongoing communications activities it can be aware of past acts of communicating and even current state so that it can help select the “best” current way to reach John Doe. Given the distributed nature of the Internet and communications, we should not try to have a single unified directory of identity but rather we should incorporate capabilities that hide this fragmentation from the user experience and assist in the selection of communications activity.

2)      Orchestration of communications tools into tasks and action: The act of communication is rarely as simple as a phone call. In fact in most situations we are forced to send messages, call phones, use conference tools and even share data over an extended period of time to accomplish our end goals. This means that we don’t simply need a better phone interface or messaging tool. What would really help in reaching the vision of better communication would be an ability to tie together different methods and tools of communications under the context of a task or interaction. For example, when we need to “assemble a team”, what communication tool is designed to do that? There are tools that allow us to call each person, tools that allow the team to be on the same call, to message each other, to indicate schedules and even to tell us we are not available but there is no real single interface into the act of “assembling a team”. The reason is that under this act of assembling, multiple tools and systems are used in a complex coordination. In most cases the tools don’t come from the same vendor nor do they use the same technology or system. Once we cross system or vendor boundaries things become fragmented. “Assemble” is not the only example of this. In fact almost everything we do at the human level related to communications and interaction has this problem and most high level actions do not map neatly to a tool or system yet each is entirely intuitive to us at a human level. What is needed is a layer of technology that is independent of the underlying communications tools and can coordinate their activities to make these human interactions possible as technology not just ideas.  Because such technology would cross vendor boundaries and treat the telecoms systems as commodity, the current vendor ecosystems have no incentive to build such services.

What is not needed is a new phone system or video technology or even a new directory. What is needed is technology that can pull together the fragmented and complex communications systems into a unified experience that crosses vendor silos and focuses on intuitive human functions and tasks. While this sounds obvious, this is not simple to deliver from the incumbents as it commoditizes their value and forces cooperation which they have little history of doing.

Industry Structure Economics Inhibit Change: Designed to Fail

To achieve the future, the past must commoditize and new vendors emerge to leverage that commodity.

This statement, that our industry is designed to fail in reaching a visionary future, is pretty controversial. I have spent my entire career inside this industry and I have seen how it is innovative, insightful and exciting but also dysfunctional, hostile to innovation, short sighted and at best reactive and at worse self destructive. The ideal in communications is unification and simplicity and a highly personal control over the systems and behaviors, but the industry that currently delivers technology to attempt to reach that goal is structured optimally to prevent that from happening.

Movements towards ideal communication experiences are generally disruptive. The typical provider of telecommunications systems today in the enterprise has been in business for over 20 years. Some have been in existence for over 100. Over such a long duration, these companies have built up huge installed bases that are composed of systems that cannot possibly deliver a truly revolutionary user experience. The challenge is that the very existence of these vendors is dependent on controlling their legacy base and preventing attrition to alternate vendors or technologies. A few examples of this include:

1)      Voice vendors resisted the adoption and delivery of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) not because it was technically difficult but rather that it would open their installed bases to upgrades and architectural changes that would increase the chance of displacement.

2)      Messaging and IM vendors refused to share identity information that would allow for interworking between IM clients because control of the user identity and credential was the only way to keep that user within their base.

3)      Unified client vendors (Microsoft, IBM, and others) refuse to unify their software approach or even interwork between frameworks ( such as .Net and SOA approaches) because a common software structure would allow customers to move between the systems easily and enable third party developers to easily build for either base.

4)      Every voice vendor, when they finally implemented VoIP, did so using proprietary protocols (Skinny for Cisco, UNIStim for Nortel, CorNET IP for Siemens…) which did not interwork and locked terminals to the core switching systems.

Protecting your base is the most important goal of most telecom and IT vendors today and to do that they refuse to move to a more uniform approach or even to allow alternate technologies visibility if they create risk to their legacy.

The future of a more unified and intuitive experience demands an openness and portability across communications technology. No one system will be dominant and no one technology primary in communicating. The idea is that in each act of communications the best and most appropriate combination of technologies should be used. Since no one vendor delivers that complete set of services, embracing this ideal means that they move from being THE communication vendor to simply being A communication tool. That is not desirable as once you are just a commodity; you cannot command premiums such as $300 per line of voice or $700 for a desktop phone or $3000 a seat for a contact center. The idea that the telecommunication systems would become commodity is completely intuitive to everyone except the providers of that capability. Yet the vision of the future requires the existing tools be commoditized under a broader more intelligent value layer  providing an experience that is independent from the existing tools. Many of the leading communications vendors have acknowledged this and are building that new layer but generally with preference to their systems.

As an industry structured in vendor silos, the lack of vendors providing the horizontal capability is the structural weakness. With this in mind the only way to truly achieve our vision of the future is to create that horizontal layer between the tools of communications and the end users. That will require new entrants and a shifting of value. Both will be disruptive but without this change the best we can hope for is a better version of the experience within a closed vendor silo and that will not come close to the transparency and usefulness envisioned long ago in science fiction.

In parts I and II of this dialog a idealistic but hopefully logical vision emerged. The questions now is “If the world envisioned a better way to communicate decades ago in science fiction, why have we not created that experience?”

The list of reasons is long but boils down to two major challenges:

1)      Industry Structure and Fragmentation: Designed to Fail

2)      Lack of Technical Capability:  Absence of a Unified Experience

Given that the vision is pretty clear to even non technical people who watch TV shows about the future, clearly the evolution and current poor state of communications is not based on a lack of vision or obvious goal. Even the narrowest minded person in this industry can explain what “better communications” might look like.  That leaves only issues related to capability and execution as the reason for our lack of progress. In the next few posts it is worth exploring these obstacles so we consider how we might overcome them…

If we could describe a communications experience without being biased by how we do such activities today, how would we describe it?

We would interact with people by name, role or skill they had rather than technical identities and underlying systems. We would never dial a 10 digit number to reach a person; we would simply invoke communications by name or some other human centric intuitive identity.

We would invoke communications based on the way we wished to interact (audio, visual, text, virtual reality…) not based on the tool and technology that implemented the communications experience. We would cease to care that our audio conversation was done via and enterprise PBX, Skype, Google or a cell phone. There is no value in our knowing the details of the technical implementation of our communications experience but there is high value in our ability to select the way we wish to interact.

We would be able to have multiple communications channels and modes (audio, visual, informational, …) active in the context of a single act of communicating. The ideal experience is one where we connect to other parties and within that connection many tools are brought to bear to enrich the flow of information but they are contextually related to each other and their aggregate is the communications experience not each one as a distinct communications experience. Some call this multi-modal interaction.

We would trust the systems to act on our behalf. The idea of telling a communication system to manage a complex interaction would be normal. Imagine being able to instruct a system to “get the team together when the customer call in”  or “make sure everyone is informed about an ongoing event” or even “organize  team to respond to an issue and bring me in when they are ready to give me an update”. Every one of these scenarios is logical, intuitive but today done by human intervention rather than the systems of communications.

We would have full access to all of our communications capabilities wherever we are. There would be no concept of fixed versus mobile communications. Simply put the experience would be fully with us, regardless of if we were at our desk, in our homes, on a plane, in a car or with a customer.

We would be able to control all communications services and interact with them in a uniform way but not have to carry the infrastructure around with us. What we would have is a “universal remote control” and an interface into the experience.  Imagine the user experience being so simple that you could invoke complex interaction and collaboration simply by saying to your interface “get the team together at 3PM”. No more emails, phone calls, phone tag, dialing in, calling people or in any way interacting at a technical level with the system that enabled communications. This is the equivalent of how great universal remotes work in home entertainment today. You push a button and the TV turns on, the DVD launches, the surround system invokes and all the linkages between them happen so that you can enjoy a home theater experience with a single click. If that is possible in entertainment why can’t we imagine it being the way we interact with communications in the future?

The Future of Communications is:

Using Technology to Interact between people using human identities and structures, over multiple modes and methods of communications that are unified into a single integrated experience that is available to us fully wherever we are at the click of a button or the invocation of a simple directive.  Sounds a lot like the Communicator in Star Trek…now the trick is to make it a reality.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)
English physicist & science fiction author (1917 – )

The future of communications is not driven by what is technically possible based on past activity but rather by a radical approach to revolutionizing the user experience for the future.

Communications at its core is about interaction, knowledge transfer, sharing, collaborating, and linking groups, thoughts and skills. If we seek the future of communications, we should start by asking what an alternate and better, but so far unachievable, user experience should be. If your consider the Star Trek series and the technology displayed there, the details of how it worked were not what enthralled us, it was rather the way the technology enhanced the capabilities of the human beings using it. Warp Drive was about being able to take us farther than ever possible. The medical devices and scanners were about people being able to diagnose with certainty an illness or condition. Phasers where about being able to protect oneself in a way that allowed you to select the outcome (kill, stun…). And Communicators were about being able to invoke complex communications between people without technical intrusiveness (notice they never dialed a phone number or looked up a directory entry before they talked).

All of these technologies were intuitive to the audience because they represented a better way to experience the world, accomplish a goal or exist as a human being. Yet every one of them was equivalent to magic as the technical capability to do them still to this day eludes us.

When you see that vision of a better way to exist, depending on your view, you either dismiss it as a fantasy or decide that if you can dream it and it makes sense, you would try to make it happen. When I think about the future of communications, or any space for that matter, I always try to consider what about the user experience is missing and how we might improve or transform the task the technology is focused on rather than just try to find a role for a new technology without context. In essence, to answer the question “What is the Future of Communications?” we must start with a view of what the communications experience should look like regardless of our bias and insight of existing technical capabilities.

“What is the Future of Communications?” … continued in part II

Today I have been watching many of the activities going on at VoiceCon in Orlando FL via the Internet. Using twitter I am getting updates, using streaming video from some vendors I could watch much of the keynote activity and seeing the news releases and editorials I honestly am getting a good feeling for the activity there. The bonus is that I did not have to fly to Florida and given that I am pretty busy at the moment that’s a great bonus.

Anyway, in the course of looking at the Voicecon activity I remembered that a few years ago I did a keynote on that stage talking about the future of our industry. Out of curiosity I wanted to see what I had said and if it was relevant to the dialog I had just heard some two years later by the industry. Well I just found the video in their archives (jump about 12 minutes forward as the begining is a company update from Mike Z, the CEO of Nortel) and it is pretty amazing how on target the comments there where. If you wish to compare and contrast, watch my keynote video from 2 years ago and watch the keynotes from today… interesting the similarity.  I leave it to you to determine how and if any of this matters but its always interesting to see what we were thinking a few years ago.

A few key observations I would make from this review is that while many of the aspects we talked about back then are now becoming real, there are many things left to do. Most prominent is that we have not fully involved the carrier network in the UC vision. We have not fully extended the enterprise experience outside of the enterprise boundary and we have not achieved clarity on how the IT and telecoms vendors will work together versus compete for the intersection. This means that while that vision laid out years ago is progressing nicely, there is still a huge amount of new technology and industry re-composition to occur before we reach that reality. That’s exciting and feeds my optimism for this industry.