The ICT Optimist

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