Processes without limits

To pave the road to a Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) environment - communication services need to be separated from specific applications and devices and moved into small, easily accessible pieces. This enables enterprise networks to intelligently detect and proactively respond to specific business events – automatically triggering the appropriate communications processes to handle those events.

Consider an average customer support call. A customer might phone for advice in resolving a technical issue they're having with an important but highly technical product. Though all the technical employees are in the field, enterprise customer service needs to help the customer immediately to keep him happy and to meet required service level agreements.

In the past, the customer service representative would probably have called the technician's mobile, waited for him to call back, tried another technician, and kept the customer on hold for a few minutes before apologetically offering to call him back. This is hardly efficient, but it's the best many enterprises can do because their support process is constrained by the limits of their technology.

What if the customer's call could kick off an entire string of events, instantly reaching the right people and setting up all necessary communications links? In a CEBP environment, the simple act of creating a trouble ticket would kick off a series of events. The system would:

query the HR database to build a list of technicians that have successfully completed training on the product in question

check presence information for each technician to check whether they're available

use GPS information from each technician's mobile phone to rank them by who is closest to the customer's office

check the technicians' schedules to find out who will be available first initiate a phone call, instant messaging session, email alert and/or videoconference with that technician that lets the customer service person explain the situation and confirm attendance at the customer premises automatically confirm the visit with the customer

Each step requires a different form of communication and a separate effort by the customer service representative, who would normally have to juggle the phone and several different applications to complete each step. This translates into a considerable amount of time, energy and money spent chasing the right people; by transferring this effort to an automated system, companies can improve efficiency and boost customer satisfaction.

Modular communications, modular business

But how does CEBP work? Conceptually, it's similar to service oriented architecture (SOA), a way of developing software that assembles complete applications from discrete parts called 'Web services'. Each Web service does one thing – for example, looking up details of a purchase order, printing an invoice, executing a bank transfer and transferring payment details into the enterprise's financial system. Instead of building an Accounts Payable application from scratch, developers could just combine the four Web services and be ready to go.

CEBP does the same thing with communications services. Where each business application previously used application programming interfaces (APIs) to explicitly control the IP PBX, CEBP applications just say "I need to check the presence status of technician Joe Bloggs, then conference him into an instant messaging chat with this customer". The PBX handles all the details in the background. APIs are about minutiae, while CEBP is about results.

Alliances with SOA solution vendors have enabled CEBP to build on its expertise and deliver real results for customers by providing a full range of communications services as flexible, portable, robust and accessible as SOA frameworks have done with business functions.

In addition because these solutions are totally based on open standards, they are easily accessible from any business application, regardless of vendor, using concepts that developers already understand and can integrate with their own applications.

Agile Communication Environments or ACE enables telecommunication carriers to develop a broad range of communications and infrastructure services which give customers access to those services as and when they're needed. In this way, carriers can help customers quickly realize the ultimate goal of CEBP: that any business application can use any communications service to contact any person they need, when they are needed, wherever they are.

CEBP can drive significant process changes in any business. Instead of worrying about how they will reach people, staff take communications for granted – and benefit from intelligent systems that create better business processes, facilitating new social interactions and greater productivity. Long-entrenched workflows can be completely rewritten to capitalize upon communities of efficiency – malleable alliances of workers that group and regroup to solve business problems as they emerge.

The result? A flexible, results-focused organization with employees that can get on with getting the job done. You may have thought mobile phones were a big step back then, but CEBP promises equally big changes in the way business applications work. Once CEBP takes hold, you'll be amazed where it takes you.

(Contributed by Kirsten Gilbertson, Leader, Emerging Technologies, Emerging Markets, Nortel)