UCStrategies Experts Debate New Modes of Work and the Role of UC

22 Jun 2011
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This Industry Buzz podcast is subtitled "Will UC Make You Stupid?" The UCStrategies Experts debate new modes of work, and the role UC will be playing in them, with Michael Finneran moderating.

The UC Expert panel also includes Marty Parker, Don Van Doren, John Bartlett, Art Rosenberg, Russell Bennett, and Dave Michels.

Michael Finneran: Hello everyone. This is Michael Finneran for UCStrategies. I'll be leading our Podcast today, the topic of which is "Will UC Make You Stupid?" That's my way of kicking off the discussion. New modes of work and the role UC will be playing in them. What got me thinking about this are the differences between the way my son and I approach education. Like many of us, my education can only be described as rigorous, hours of reading, research papers, etc. My son's college education seems to have little of that and it still took six years. What also got me thinking about this is I have been reading some things by Malcolm Gadwell, a Canadian, who has written books like Outliers and Tipping Point. He's sort of a new-age throwback. One of the themes he cites regularly is the 10,000-hour rule. He says it's not his original, but for any serious skill, musicians, surgeons, hockey players - and of course because he is Canadian he finds a hockey relationship to everything - it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become really proficient at something. Of course, a lot of what he says sounds like what the nuns pounded into me back at St. Nicholas of Tolentine grammar school.

But with UC, the descriptions we see seem to look like a hyperfrenetic, hyper-connected environment with text, email, even the language-you jump on a video conference. It does seem to embrace that sort of lifestyle. However, the example that Evans has suggested, human beings can only do one thing consciously at a time. Now, unconsciously we do a bunch of things like driving a car while talking on the phone. Though, I wouldn't actually recommend that, google the term "inattention blindness," which argues against cell phone use and driving. But the two questions that I will pose to the group are first, am I missing something? Is there really a new way of learning that has developed or is it just that we were raised on this rigorous education process and maybe there is a new way of doing things and I just haven't caught up. But more to the point for us is, if productive work still takes time and concentration, what should we be looking for in UC products that would support that? I know Marty Parker, you had some pretty strong views on this.

Marty Parker: Thanks Michael, yes. Well, the first is that I have been a student of business productivity for a long time. Business productivity is a very simple equation: how much output do you get divided by how much input it cost you. Output over input. So any tool that improves the output or any tool that lets the output be produced by a less costly input is a gain in productivity. And some of the things that are happening in unified communications are that. I will give you an analogy to bring it into focus. So once upon a time, let's think back 500 years or so, only a skilled artisan after maybe 10,000 hours or that would be five years of an employee's time at basically 2,000 hours a year... Only after that amount of time, usually called an apprenticeship, could that person create a table or a cabinet or something out of wood. They had to learn how to plane and shape and finish and sand and drill and do all those things. But today, someone can learn in a much smaller amount of time, how to describe what they want to build to a numerical-controlled machine, which will then produce as many of those as you want exactly to the same specifications in a fraction of the time. So you don't have to learn all those manual lessons because it's been automated. There are many other things in our lives that fit with that.

Bringing it back into the unified communications space, I think that those tools are so valuable. For example, you no longer have to manually, like the woodworkers of the past had to do, manually keep a list of contacts on a piece of paper or in a Rolodex and manually dial the number. That doesn't happen anymore. You no longer have to manually type a letter with carbon paper and put it in envelopes and mail it, with manual distribution from the mailroom, to communicate within the company or even outside of it-it's known as email folks, and instant messaging. So those things have been changed by taking radical shifts, making radical shifts in how they get done. It's amazing how much of that has happened in this past century, 50 years, even the past decade. The pace of innovation doesn't seem to be slowing down very much, because so many things are being reduced to software. So what I think Don and others are going to say here in a moment, is that that's right but we need to have the right training and right support and even the right rules and processes to put these new tools to use effectively. So Don, let me pass to you and get your comments.

Don Van Doren: Thanks Marty. I think that there is clearly a lot perception about unified communications that all of these sort of tools make us really too available. And this has frankly been an argument since voicemail days. I can remember even back then people were saying, "Oh gosh, I am not sure I want all this. We become too accessible by all these kinds of tools." And certainly, I think that the broad deployment of this, especially if it's done without training or allowing restrictions, can really exacerbate the issue. This is precisely why I think we need to do a lot of training and we need to make sure that people really understand how to use these new capabilities. This really speaks, I think, to the skills issue that you brought up earlier. And the point here is that new skills are going to be necessary to really understand how to incorporate these kinds of tools to make us productive and not to make it so interruptive. And I think that is really the key to a lot of this. Arguably, I think the kids with some of their new communications methods are learning a different skill set in terms of how they work with some of the tools that are available to them. I've not done studies as to your point, Michael, about whether they can truly multi-task at some of these things very well. The point is that they are learning new skills and I think that is part of it.

The other piece is that I think we've got to do a much better job on focusing on some of the new capabilities to allow these tools to be more effective. So for example, one of the things that I'm really focused on as part of all the presence discussions is the whole issue about policies and rules engines. I think that we've done too little work in this area and I think the vendors haven't done a really good job to provide good tools in this field. For example, we still have an awful lot of manual setting of presence capabilities. And frankly, whatever presence we use is a pretty blunt instrument. In other words, you are sort of available, or busy, or away, to everybody and that's just not realistic. What we have to do is have much more differentiation between projects that we're working on, or boss/subordinate relationships, and other kinds of differentiations that I think are going to be really important going forward. The trick of course, is how do you make these kinds of rules and policies detailed enough but not so complex to implement or manage? And I think that's going to be a key challenge moving forward, but one that is absolutely essential to avoid some of this interruption and multitasking that a lot of concern has been raised about. I think the vendors supplying templates for example, would really be a good start - a helpful beginning to start putting some of these kinds of capabilities in place.

And in that kind of a context, where you are getting interrupted only because of things on which you are working, on which are focused, these are capabilities that improve productivity, that carry us forward and really help achieve the business goals and I think that's the goal of how we want to do this. John, what are some of your ideas?

John Bartlett: Thanks, Don. I agree that a lot of it has to be about policies and I think that people also need to understand the environment and figure out how to work within that. And if I look at my 20-something children, I see that they have been able to, in fact, focus on things that are of importance to them. My son has played soccer from the time he was six into college and he probably put in those 10,000 hours. So when there's something like that they really want to go after, they seem to know how to focus on that and do it. So in my mind it's about choosing the behavior that lets you do that. When I first worked as an engineer in a cubicle-based office, we were concerned about having enough focused time and we invented tricks. We had yellow plastic chains that we'd put across our cubicle that said, "I need to focus and concentrate now. Yes, I am here but don't interrupt me." And I think those are the policies that Don is talking about that allow us to choose the times when we are available for communications and when we are not.

Another one that I am aware of, as you know, I focus on video conferencing and I have heard from a number of customers that they see one of the values of using video conferencing for a group meeting is that it in fact forces the folks to pay attention. Because the boss can see you and the boss can see whether you are paying attention to the content of that meeting or not. And that's kind of a technology being used to help us overcome other technologies. Because if it's an audio call we all know we are going to read our email or do whatever else is around if we are not interested in the topic and not be paying attention, which can make the meeting less productive and less efficient. It can even take longer than it would otherwise. I have had a number of folks say that the video meeting takes less time and we get the work done.

Overall, I think what I am saying is that the interruption capability that UC provides can be overcome. We have to think about it, but we have to learn the new ways of working in this environment to find the times when we are available and when we need to focus on the work at hand. Art, did you have some thoughts on this?

Art Rosenberg: Yes, thanks. UC gives you the flexibility to initiate a contact, whatever that is, and also gives you the flexibility to respond to a contact that you get, and this is the area where the policies come into play. Not necessarily to stop you from initiating a contact, but more importantly, what are the priorities for responding to a contact, this is particularly in the area of a contact center where you have experts and so on... People don't necessarily need to have an immediate response the way we used to have to do with the telephone, because if you didn't answer right away, they hung up, they went away, you lost a customer, and that's where your money comes from. So clearly, we have other ways of communicating and I reference the idea of call return, where you try to get a hold of somebody, but guess what - they are busy. But they let you know immediately that they know you've tried to make contact and they will get back to you and even give you a rough amount of time. And if you are mobile, who cares where you actually are? They will get back to you no matter what, and also in any modality. And that is the flexibility of UC that comes into play with business communications, but the priorities still have to be set in policy in terms of the responsiveness to somebody else - a customer, a partner, or somebody within the organization.

Michael Finneran: I know Russell you had a slightly different view on this.

Russell Bennett: What? ...Sorry, I was just looking at my internet browser... But with all kidding aside, to your question, does UC make you stupid? I would respond equally humorously hopefully, with stupid is as stupid does, right? It's the way that you use the technology and I would argue that UC does not make you more available than you currently are now, via email, SMS, social networking, etc. And it doesn't make you more available than you choose to be, to the points that some of the other guys were making. A good implementation of a UC system has got more than just red, yellow, green presence. It has all kinds of presence enrichment mechanisms that might be a little textual message saying, "busy writing annual reviews," "do not disturb," or something like that. You can manually set your presence to "not available" even if the system is not displaying the fact that you are in a meeting, which a good system will do...in a meeting or on a phone call or doing something else. A good system will also have the rule filters that people have already mentioned that you can make yourself more available to some people than others. Your boss can always contact you or your colleagues can contact you if you are available and other people have to have permission to contact you. Having worked at Microsoft for a number of years on UC, my primary means of communication at work was UC for the last four years. And people do learn new skills and new types of etiquette and protocols. So a phone call would always start with an instant message. And the instant message just had two letters, "yt," which is "are you there?" And if you responded with "y," then the person knew that it was okay for them to call you. If you didn't respond at all or you said, after 11:00 or something like that, then that was an aid to managing your rate of interruptions.

So I would argue that a rich presence system or be it that these are proprietary these days and not interoperable, is a great tool for managing your rate of interruption and your personal productivity. There are just software implementations of the yellow plastic chain that I think John mentioned. But I think that these things will only get better and if people learn to use them properly then they should become more productive, rather than less productive.

Art Rosenberg: When you describe what you were doing at Microsoft, you were notifying people first before you attempted to have a realtime exchange. And that's a lot better than blindly trying to interrupt somebody, not knowing where they are to begin with, or if they are busy doing something and that's just very impractical. The whole telephony image has got to change to one where you check the information first and you let people know that you need to talk and like "click to talk" - even from a document and then if somebody is available, they will say yes. And if not, they will schedule a time if you need to have a conversation.

Russell Bennett: Exactly.

Michael Finneran: Well, it looks like the message that we are getting from this is that we are not stopping the advance of technology. And Marty has it right, it's about productivity, but being successful at this is going to be really a means of our learning how to use this technology effectively, whether it's Russell's pinging for people or John's idea of a yellow chain across the cubicle, the tools can make us productive, it's a matter of how we learn to use them and use them most effectively.

Dave Michels: Michael, I would like to add a thought on that because I think the tools could do a lot more to help us in this endeavor. The point that I want to make there is, when I am in an airport and I am watching all this overhead paging going on and you can watch them-if they page into their phone and it doesn't come over the speakers right away, it's queued up to make sure there are no collisions. And that kind of logic doesn't apply in unified communications - we have a collision rich environment and I am on the phone - well right now as a matter of fact - but at any second my Skype could go off - if I am doing our webcast or something, I have to turn off so many different things. And I don't understand why there can't be more intelligence. Why can't the systems detect when my phone is off the hook and mute my music, mute my computer sounds, and do things like that with more sophistication and a little bit more intelligence. I think that unified communications represents so many different means and modes of communication, but still they are all disparate; they are not related, they are not talking to each other and they are not aware of each other's status at all. The problem with this productivity gap that we are talking about here, is the fact that humans do not multi-task and this took me a long time to admit, because I took a lot of pride in my multi-tasking skills. But humans don't multi-task and I have learned that to be true and I admit that to be true now. Every distraction drives down productivity and we are surrounded by potential distractions between our cellphones, laptops, and phones and emails. One of the classes I took on productivity, talked about turning off all of the email notifications - which seems counter-intuitive to me, but if you are in the middle of writing something or working with a spreadsheet and you get that little envelope or something and you can't help it, you have to go see what it is and it drives down productivity. And so I have turned off all these things and it's unfortunately a very manual process to have to do all that. I have simultaneous rings on some of my numbers and if I am in a meeting in my office, talking to somebody and my cellphone just rings, that was one thing and I could kind of ignore it or hit mute. But now it's like three phones, my computer, my desktop, my cellphone, all ringing and it's just so much distraction. Why can't I have location awareness on my cellphone or make it so only one phone rings. Or why can't it look at my calendar and decide that I am not available and in a meeting and send the calls over to voicemail. Why does it have to take so much activity on my part? So I think the tools could do a lot to improve our productivity.

Art Rosenthal: What we ought to include is not whether something is ringing or notifying, you need a little bit of screening, as not all calls are the same, not all messages are the same, and you need to have some priorities about what's important. Or the need for timely response.

Dave Michels: I could set the priorities if I had the tools, but I don't have the tools. Right now it's a completely manual effort.

Art Rosenthal: Right, well the thing is, does anybody know what's important to you at any given moment of time. Are they going to read your mind or what?

Dave Michels: The tools need to be designed so that I can set things up.

Marty Parker: I would comment that there are multiple ways to solve the importance problem. One is already visible in call centers and that is to look at the business process. In call centers, there is a lot of data that is used. Is this a repeat customer, is this a high value customer, does this customer speak a certain language, are they on their cellphone? A lot of data can be used to drive those inferences, which is what I think Dave Michels is suggesting. The other that can be done is to use software heuristics, speech recognition for example like drag-and-dictate exemplify this where each time that I am dictating and correct a word, it goes back and updates its model. So it is very possible for the software to observe what I am doing and learn how I work most effectively. The problem with that of course is that there may be a need for templates, so I can pick what kind of work I am doing and the other problem is that I need an integrated interface - think of the word unified communications - in order that the software can watch everything I am doing, not just a silo of what I am doing. Don, you were going to say?

Don Van Doren: Marty, you were making just the same point I was going to about the whole call center area. There is a good example of how we've really integrated the processes and the technology and the way people are working to gain some real effectiveness and efficiencies. And I think it's exactly this kind of thing that I was trying to comment about before, where I think the vendors have to do a better job of focusing on developing the capabilities that allow this ability to look across different communications modalities, the ability to understand Marty as you said, the kinds of activities that I am currently involved in as a sort of templating issue that I think we need to get involved in. Again, the challenge is that this becomes or could become extremely complex and very detailed. And that's the problem - how do we balance that effectively. That's why I think this kind of a templating approach is something that is going to be essential to making these sorts of policy and rules capabilities more widely available.

Art Rosenberg: Hey Don, this is Art. I think what you've described is what we would call the personal call center. In other words, it's not for the whole business or the whole organization, but it's the individual end user within an organization who has to have the equivalent of that call center intelligence in terms of screening and prioritizing and so on.

Don Van Doren: And to be clear, of course, I know you mean not just calls, obviously -

Art Rosenberg: No, any kind of contact.

Don Van Doren: Sure, absolutely right.

Michael Finneran: Well this has certainly been a wide ranging discussion, both in terms of the tools, the productivity impact, and of course, the possible need for better technology to help us along the way. So I would like to thank all of my UCStrategies colleagues for their contributions and wish you all a good day on this longest day of the year. Bye all.

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