Graham Brierton, CTO VoiceSage, ecomm09 Source:

Well our presentation at eComm has been delivered and you can check it out here. We will post video if and when it becomes available. We think that there are some important points to be communicated  relating to the true value of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes), and the potential future value of CEBP in a Telco2 / Web2.0/ Enterprise2.0 world. eComm is seen as the leading event globally for disruptive telecommunications service providers so we are very proud to be there.

The presentations are put up on Slideshare for viewing and comment, but Twitter is the backchannel of choice for all these conferences and eComm is no different, though less busy than I for one expected (perhaps a reflection of social media participation versus consumption).

There have been a few notable announcements so far, including the open source, royalty free release of the Skype Wideband audio codec which may become a defacto standard in future communication modes (more here). It is part of the Skype-Everywhere strategy, and from an Innovation point of view, well worth keeping an eye on.

Other announcements (here) included the launch of www.grid.com by Jamie Siminoff enabling people to build fairly sophisticated telecommunications-web services. Jamie was the driver behind www.phonetag.com so he is worth watching. 

The good people over at dial2do have an interview with me over on their blog is you want to drop over and say hello. Dial2Do were speakers at ecom 2008, and their thoughts on "social phone" and "social media" are worth following.

Update: nearly forgot. HT www.sabrinadent.com for all her design effort on the presentation. She tells some of the Elephant Story here http://www.sabrinadent.com/2009/03/05/the-adventures-of-invisible-elephant/

"30% of kids finish high-school in the USA"

(Bill Gates, TED 2009)"

For a long time, this figure was hidden because the system was only measuring the "drop out rate" from the start of final year to end of final year, not from start of high school to finishing high school. Oh yeah, if you are poor, and a minority, it ain’ looking too good for you. You have a higher chance of going to jail than finishing a four year college degree. Turns out the big difference is good teachers, getting them, rewarding them, celebrating them, keeping them. A good teacher will increase the performance of a class by 10% right away. It would remove the difference between the performance of USA vs Asia in Education. Seniority, having a masters degree; no effect on being a good teacher. It just seems that some people are great teachers and we have not the first clue why. The only thing we know is that past performance is a great predictor of future performance.

In the Q&A at Ted with Bill Gates he goes on speak about the problem of Malaria and African poverty illustrating that as you improve health rates, adults need less children to be born, because there is a higher chance of having children that survive into adulthood that can in turn look after you (the oldest pension scheme in the world). As family size decreases, the average wealth per family increases. And now the link. Another one of the Ted Talks investigates the predictive power of interventions with regards Aids in Africa: how about this: your likelihood of engaging in safe practices and heath enhancing activities is directly related to your already existing expectations of longevity. If you expect to die of malaria in the next 10 years, then you are more likely to engage in risky practices in the near term. In other presentations, free trade and exporting are also shown as being directly correlated with higher income levels, and longer life, but what if doubling free trade actually quadrupled the incidence of aids in a particular area? The more physical movement there is, the more contagions spread. The take away being that spending $50bn on education as an intervention for Aids, might be misplaced. Its not more awareness that a condom might save your life, but that you will live longer because the system is going to ensure that you don’t die in childbirth, that you have nets to fight malaria, that you have access to micro-capital to build a small business.

What I like about these accounts is that they demonstrate that sometimes what you think you know is wrong. The data is "showing you to increase spending in education to impact aids, as education changes behaviour" (sic). We know that good teachers and good teaching drives student performance, yet we have no granularity, DATA or predictability that helps this to be managed. In other words, we have no causality. In (oh dear, yes ‘my masters programme’) we came across concepts such as "faulty causality", and "statistical artifacts". I wonder how many of these "facts" surround us every day in the assumptions that underpin how we manage our businesses and relationships? Facts such as "this is an unprofitable customer"?

IT Investment As Barrier To Entry

Facts such as "IT helps smaller players compete globally",(Andrew McAfee)  and the rise of Free IT such as Google Mail, Docs, and eePC’s, lower the barriers to entry associated with starting a business. We hear this a lot. We hear that Enterprise 2.0 will empower the end user, re-shape the corporation, perhaps even redefine what it is to be a corporation. But perhaps it also helps larger organisations overcome the drawbacks associated with scale (over formalisation, speed, flexibility) and actually makes larger companies more efficient and effective than smaller competitors. One of the reasons being pointed to is that technology (and its cost) is one thing, but getting more and better data, and making better decisions based on that data, is another. And the problem with that is that people make decisions, and very often, we make decisions based upon incorrect assumptions, faulty causality, and statistical artifacts with no true predictive power. 

Information as As Asset and ‘Competence’

Bruce MacVarish has a great take on what this means for enterprise systems. With relatively abundantly available "Technology" (i.e. Technology is not the scarcity asset), the ability to master concepts such as sensing, flow, collective intelligence, and collaboration become key. It is no surprise that these are "soft competencies", "tacit knowledge based", and "culturally embedded". All incredibly hard to develop and incredibly hard to emulate. What McAfee’s points out is that the knowledge and data accumulated will have disproportionate effects on market concentration ratios (i.e. there can only be one market maker such as Google, this is the nature of platform economics).  So you ring up two credit card companies and ask for another credit card: the first one knows who you are, who your friends are, what their credit ratings are, and asks a friend of yours how good a credit risk you are (via sms/ voice call), and at the end of a two minute call tells you that you can either pick up your card at the local shop (where a card is being encoded, and which is now expecting you). Oh, you didn’t even call the second company silly….. the killer point is that they knew a friend of yours that would vouch for you, which had a higher predictive value than any geo-targeting scheme. And thus, the mass of relationship data has a steadily increasing marginally impact.

Processes Attract Conversations, and Vice Versa

Social Computing Magazine has a great example of this kind of thinking in progress and it deservedly received much commentary this week. I believe it contains some "evident truths" which we’ve held here at VoiceSage for some time: I have messed with the semantics a bit to put our slant on it:

- Processes That Attract Conversations

- Processes In Support of Conversations

"A good example of Conversation -> Process Integration was recent demonstrated, but to elaborate, by pulling Tweets into the SAP Business Suite and applying a sentiment engine to those tweets, a customer service rep can make those conversations actionable by identifying and emerging customer or brand issue. Someone may be complaining about your product or service. With Sentiment Analysis not only can an organization proactively address a looming customer crisis, but they can initiate corporate processes such as raising a Customer Service Ticket to initiate a problem resolution process"

"Going the other way, a super example of Process -> Conversation Integration is the deployment of Marketing Campaigns using Social Channels. Using Business Suite functionality, users can now design and deploy marketing campaigns which can execute over a variety of social environments, including Twitter"

Now I think that this is a pretty "shallow example" of the potentials in the MacVarish model, but it gives you a sense that the big vendors are definitely getting it. They are not "getting it big" yet, to do that, they will have to come along to hear VoiceSage at the eComm09 talk in March, in sunny San Fran.

IBM have a lovely new report on Telco2 (oops, Telco with a Focus on Web 2.0) and they immediately draw our attention to the imperative for innovation around the actual core business model of the Telco/ enterprise. Revenue growth also shares significant top of mind, while cost take out takes a back seat.

This is followed up in the media (CNN Money no less) by a joint IBM – Avaya story around the IBM Mashup Centre Capability.

As demonstrated by Avaya, a mashup prototype for field engineering managers enables them to check for new customer problems, assign field engineers, review status of ongoing problems, and, if necessary, contact the assigned engineer or customer using e-mail, short message service (SMS) or click-to-call, all from a single Web page. When contacting the customer by phone, the engineering manager can then click the "add" button to quickly bring other participants into a conference call.

Now I am not blowing our own horn by saying that you can do all this with VoiceSage right now, but what is definitely interesting is that they make such a big deal out of "getting at the enterprise data", previously, so cleverly locked away, (sorry locked down), buy (sorry ‘by’) the software vendors. They also, clearly "get" that enterprise data, and web-native data, will need to mind-meld. They also "get" that enterprise mashups are going to have "security" front and centre. It all sounds good. Oh, and if you think any of this is divorced from happenings in the world of the iPhone, Nuance and IBM have done a deal in relation to speech recognition and IVR etc. so watch speech recognition and speech navigation enter the on-demand, enterprise mashup toolkit.

Now here’s the take away: To do this well IBM-Avaya-Other ecosystem has to completely seek to break out of the silo – websphere support strategy (IHMH). Go to ProgrammableWeb.com and look at what people are building: let me give you a clue, it involves Google maps and little else. Something is wrong in the world of Mashups and nobody has quite cracked it yet. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "I really feel like a mashup today", a fry maybe, but not a mashup.

VoiceSage does this Customer Logistics 2.0 piece day in day out, and I can tell you that our customers are definitely concerned with issues such as "number of late deliveries", "number of no shows", but at the end of the day, you do very well indeed to point out 10 fold reduction in costs. Cost Take Out is way, way more important right now than using Enterprise 2.0 for potential revenue generation. I like the idea of integration of enterprise data with web data and I for one look forward to seeing examples of companies going from "no IBM enterprise software", and "No integration partner" in the mainstream media. The IBM approach presented in these instances above seems to me to be more "Enterprise Forklift Upgrade – Engagement Strategy" to be sold to CIO’s, than true "E2.0 Thinking".

For a different perspective, and one I think has merit, see WIPRO white paper on it here.

Meanwhile, Somewhere Else in The Cloud

Dion Hinchcliffe (big time HT’s this week) points us towards CloudMQ, an enterprise class messaging (queuing) service. Interestingly it sits entirely in Amazon cloud, but I am guessing that like Joyent, these guys are looking to be cloud-platform-agnostic (for complete data and application portability). 

Jim Courtney over at SkypeJournal reports that Lotus Live and Skype partner up for collaboration in the cloud, part of the ‘Skype everywhere’ strategy. What was neat about this (for me) is that Skype point out that Skype is a great way of working with outsourcers and subcontractors globally. Indeed it is. This makes the integration very interesting. Companies have already adapted their behaviour now all IBM has to do is make Lotus relevant to that workflow. Jim goes on to quote Andy Abramson that  this is "being embedded into an offering that is key to IBM’s future success in delivering cloud-based outsourced business services".  Lets look at that again: Skype being embedded into IBM is key to IBM’s outsourcing success. On a conference call from eComm09 this week, Skype pointed out that over 10% of their users now use it for Conference calling. That’s huge.

So Is Any of This IBM Stuff Actually E2.0-Cool?

C’mon, it’s IBM and Avaya and their are very smart cookies working there (sic). Bruce McVarish points out to "IBM’s Social Networks & Discovery (SaND) research and their focus on filter improvements to identify contextually relevant people, documents and expertise within the enterprise". Basically, the system enables you to see the relationships between people, tags, and documents (i.e. is socially aware). More here. So imagine you are on a Skype call to India with a software contractor, and you can hover over the name, and see others in your social network that have recommended that person, or hover over the link to the document they are sending you to see other documents or presentations that might be useful to you? Oh, yeah you can already do some of that through the LinkedIn integration but its all that stuff locked up behind the firewall that you are trying to get at (if you are a big organisation). So all this "context" stuff and "sensing" is going to be important?

And Back To The Business Model

So where did we start this, oh yeah, Business Model Innovation. To be truly innovative companies need to find new ways of generating value, not of shifting value along the value chain (in the case of developer channel decimation in the face of mashup potential, and for Telco’s minutes calling revenues in the case of international calling). If you are an integrator, you will not be able to charge what you were charging before. The "value proposition" was in the fact that their was friction between systems, and you had to be trained, and experienced in dealing with them. I suspect Integrators will extract 1/10th of the value they previously did from enterprise integrations. So this is value destruction for Systems Integrators. Calling from Skype to Skype, SkypeOut, Skype Conference Calling is value destruction for Telco’s, premier Conferencing providers, and potentially for Unified Communications Providers. There is no longer "special sauce" involved in making all these systems gel together.

Generating new value is where the real strategic challenge is, and this means tapping into global social change. Here’s some companies that are in strategic decay because they are demonstrating a lack of purpose. Here’s one example from that list – The Swiss company Roche makes a range of HIV-related drugs:

Roche charges $25,000 a year for Fuzeon. It does not offer a discount price for developing countries. Like most industrialized countries, South Korea maintains a form of price controls. The national health insurance program sets prices for medicines, and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs listed Fuzeon at $18,000 a year. South Korea’s per capita income is roughly half that of the United States. Instead of providing Fuzeon at South Korea’s listed level—and still turning a profit—Roche refuses to make the drug available in South Korea. South Korean activists report that the head of Roche Korea told them, “We are not in business to save lives, but to make money. Saving lives is not our business.”

Lovely. And guess what, we Trust companies, governments and institutions less than ever. A "catastrophic decline" in the USA, but higher levels of trust emerging in the developing economics (BRIC). In Europe Finance, Auto, Utilities are particularly badly hit. Perhaps, activities designed to build trust relationships will be the true corporate asset of the future, and perhaps, how we use technology and communications to build these trust relationships, would be an interesting starting place.

I’ve been in conversation with the IGOPeople people for a while now and their site launch has impressed me for a number of reasons. But first, the strategic positioning: IGOPeople is a space where conversations between individuals, groups, and organisations can be seen, and followed, and published. In my opinion, its part of this new social media / CRM2.0/ Social CRM thing. As I said, I’ve spoken with the IGO-Peeps and they have a pretty deep vision for the site. Here’s what has impressed me to date:

- It looks pretty damn good and its damned easy to sign up and get started (low adoption friction);

- Conversations are flows;

- Conversations are facilitated from within IGO, or can flow from "outside-into-IGO". Loads of examples of from Twitter to IGO and IGO out to Twitter (DellCamp being one example);

- They have managed to entice some pretty major companies to try out this "new type of conversation" and they are obviously experimenting with different engagement models;

- They have "Individual’s" conversation flows going, and that’s pretty hard to do (HT to Campbell Scott for making that happen).

Best of Luck to Them. You have to ask yourself why a company wouldn’t want to at least experiment with this.

Prompted by Alan Quayle here I thought I’d put up a few reasons we are interested in going to eComm09 in March.

Ed Fontana of the Android Developer, Commuter Community Android App is speaking about "Intervals of Interest" and how it affects the design of mobile applications. I have a background (both practical and research based) in the Lean Production values of the Automotive industry, so I think this talk should be fascinating because it has as its centre the concept of reducing friction in social interactions.

Shai Berger from Fonolo will be looking back on a year of "deep dialing" . Fonolo is a great favourite with the guys from Telco2.0 because it also "reduced friction" in the interaction. The problem is kind-of simple (which all great problems are): you want to speak to a particular part of the customer service organisation, but you have to go through all the IVR menu’s to get there. Fonolo enables you to direct dial the desired destination because they have mapped that company’s system.  At VoiceSage we’ve taken advantage of this kind of thinking as well because when we map out a process (or more to the point, when you map out your own process) you can assign a deep dial as one of the process steps. One instance where this is used is where a person has been called and asked if they wish to make a payment as part of a process. Previous steps may have specified how much that person wishes to pay, their account details, or the currency etc. When linking to an Autopay solution we "deep dial" that IVR and forward the relevant details so you don’t have to ask for them again.

Irv Shapiro of IfByPhone will be speaking about Voice Services in the cloud. IfByPhone grabbed some attention last year by integrating their click2call capability with Google Analytics so that you could evaluate the ultimate effectiveness of your click strategy. Irv will be demonstrating some of his business cases and speaking about the technology architecture.

There are some "hardcore network" sessions and some pretty cutting edge ones on mobile wireless that I would love to sit in on, and mostly not understand. One good reason why we are sending our CTO Graham Brierton to the conference where he will be giving a very, very interesting talk on some of our next generation thinking.

The Picture?: If you are wondering what the picture is about, some of the things you will see at eComm09 are the early evidence of some big shifts that are lurking their under the Telco waters….