Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and unified communications are a bit like chocolate and peanut butter: Two great tastes that taste great together.
That may sound weird (particularly if you aren’t fond of chocolate or peanut butter).
But here’s the thing: SOA enables IT folks to do weird and wonderful things with their UC tools. For instance, one application developed by an enterprise organization worked like this: When a call hit a sales line but wasn’t picked up by a human, the voice mail system not only recorded the message, it sent alerts to the CRM system to create a lead and assign it to the appropriate salesperson, and then attached the recording to the lead and forwarded it, along with an e-mail, to the salesperson for immediate follow-up. Similarly, there was a series of automated events and flows that kicked in when a call came into a complaint line.
You can imagine the boost that applications like these provide to productivity (not to mention customer satisfaction). Yet interestingly, a small minority — just 7.5% — of the folks we work with are currently integrating UC with SOA.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Another 50% say they’re looking at ways to do so. In general, these folks have already instrumented their business processes with ERP and CRM and other software. They’ve developed workflows that call for voice communications at various stages of the process. And, they’ve also implemented SOA as the integration “glue” for their architectures. So it just stands to reason: If they’re using, or exploring, UC, how could they not look at bringing them together?
The real question here is, “In what fashion?” There are a variety of scenarios, like the above, that essentially use SOA to facilitate integration of asynchronous communications into business processes. In other words, the process is initiated by a human, and SOA provides the back-end to generate an automated response.
But what about the inverse? Can SOA have a role to play in looping humans into an automated interaction, perhaps by initiating auto-dialing, screen pops and the like?
In a word, yes. IT execs we work with have developed scenarios like the following: A business event — such as a past-due invoice — triggers a message from the accounting system to a remediation service, which in turn invokes contact center and phone switch services to initiate a call while at the same time populating a window on the operator’s screen to guide the call.
All the above scenarios, grouped together, fall into the broader category of what is sometimes called “communications-enabled business processes” — although it could equally well be called “SOA-enhanced communications processes”. But that’s too geeky a term — well, actually, both terms are pretty geeky. The real point here is that combining UC with SOA can lead to more effective business processes, which makes for more agile and responsive organizations.
And that’s a great taste, even if you don’t like chocolate or peanut butter.
