Using Intelligent Presence to Create Smarter Business Applications

Technology is a great enabler, but people are what drive an enterprise. We have all experienced the frustration of needing to urgently reach a team member. Their IM says "online", but there is no response. Phone calls to their business and mobile numbers go to voice mail although the calendar shows no prior commitments. What is needed is a way to tie disparate bits of presence information into a cohesive picture of the sought after individual's availability.

How many of you bother to change your IM status from "online" to "on the phone" (and then back again)? I don't think many do. This inaccuracy is the Achilles heel that limits the utility of today's presence solutions. They are silos of not always up-to-date presence information. To create presence-aware applications requires real-time aggregation of "user" identity and presence state from multiple devices (IM clients, calendars, telephony, GPS-enabled devices, and so on).

First Steps
Fledging steps towards improving the utility of presence information have been taken by a variety of vendors. By working with Avaya and other vendors, traditional desktop-based collaboration applications such as IBM Lotus Sametime Connect and Microsoft Office Communications Server can now provide a picture of both IM and telephony status (assuming your phone system is configured appropriately). The combined information provides a more accurate picture of individual presence.

Despite the progress on this front, vendor-specific presence solutions present IT and developers with challenges. First and foremost, all parts of the enterprise must run the same presence solution for the information to be available on the entire user community. This is difficult to achieve with today's decentralized organizations. Furthermore, there is no common way to develop presence-aware applications. Many vendors mean multiple protocols and APIs. This fragmentation highlights the need for a single vendor-independent view of presence information. And to be truly useful, presence needs to be "always on" (not just driven by a desktop client).

See the Possible
It's time to fire up the imagination. With the availability of more accurate presence information standard business processes could be transformed into Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). For example, a manufacturing plant could use a CEBP to trigger a series of escalations when a production exception is identified from real-time data stream monitoring. Presence information could be used to pull together a SWAT team of respondents. Managers and teams would be connected based on their proximity to the event and availability, thereby improving process execution and timely resolution of issues.

Customer service/call centers are another good example of business functions that stand to benefit from presence-enhanced applications. What if we created a "Resident Expert Finder"? The system would allow agents to dynamically locate the "best fit" available resource beyond the contact center. Integrated presence gives immediate access to experts and drives first call resolution, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Presence information also improves the effectiveness of team collaboration. With accurate presence, far less time would be wasted trying to reach team members. You would truly know when your coworkers are available and when they are not. This increases productivity by improving communication between mobile, remote, and headquarters employees.