UC
Arguably the key benefit of unified communications (UC) is reducing human latency, allowing individuals to speed the time it takes them to find the right person for a particular problem. Presence-enabled communications takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out how best to reach someone (telephone, cell phone, IM, e-mail, etc.), creating opportunities to improve customer response, sales support, and project completion times. But the concept of “find the expert” is based on a pre-requisite that the person initiating the session knows who the best person is to contact for a particular need. Most organizations we work with are still developing their strategies around identification of subject matter experts, relying on group accounts, job titles, or skills-based routing using information contained in directories or help desk applications. As social computing emerges as an enterprise application, UC architects are starting to discover that relying on the “wisdom of the crowds “can improve the ability to locate the ideal resource for a specific need. Enterprise social computing platforms such as IBM Lotus Connections, Jive SBS, Microsoft SharePoint, Newsgator Social Sites and many others let users create their own profiles that they can tag with their areas of expertise, but these platforms also enable users to tag the profiles of others, further adding to the amassing of collective knowledge. So when I, as a contact center agent, a sales support person, or a technical support worker, need to find someone to help me address a question, I can search the social application for a specific keyword, identify people who have tagged themselves or been tagged as experts in that particular area, and initiate a conversation based on their availability to communicate. Interest in social computing is growing. Fifty-four percent of companies have some social initiative underway, and we’re seeing a clear trend toward incorporating social computing planning into overall communication and collaboration strategy development, incorporating applications such as voice, video, messaging, and document collaboration. As more companies recognize the value of integrating social computing and UC, and as integration between different applications improve, I expect social computing to quickly become an integral part of an enterprise UC architecture.
