Tthe Future of Communications – Part V – No Unified Experience
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.