Communication-Enabled Mashups: Empowering Both Business Owners and IT

Technology has developed many communication methods—email, IM, SMS, call recording, presence status, and voice calls. And today's path for unified communications is aligning these communication services more and more with back-office business processes and applications. The business challenge: How can you easily converge disparate business systems, databases and communications systems to make them convenient for business staff to leverage at the point of need, without overburdening an already stretched-thin IT organization?

An appropriate solution must meet the varying needs of both end users and IT staff to:

• Seamlessly integrate business applications and access to communications
• Be tailored to the needs of individual roles and users
• Adapt quickly and efficiently to rapidly changing business needs
• Present consistent access across a variety of communication options
• Provide reliable and secure communications at the point of need
• Enable IT staff to work proactively and prepare solutions in advance of need
• Provide robust security and management

The Solution: Communication-Enabled Mashups
Avaya and IBM have combined their expertise to enable business solutions that addresses this issue: Communication-Enabled Mashups.

A mashup is a lightweight web application consisting of a set of software components called widgets. Each widget performs a single task. Some widgets access and display data. Other widgets carry out an action. Combined to create a mashup, widgets combine and display information from multiple sources on a single screen. Combining and presenting all relevant information on one screen makes possible immediate insights sometimes missed when users must switch from application to application, or when they would otherwise need to wait for some future development resources to be made available to specifically analyze and present these results.

The following table shows how Communication-Enabled Mashups address specific end user and IT department requirements.

Creating Mashups
Creating mashups is a two-step process. First, IT departments create a set of widgets for their business and communications applications, or acquire them from component catalogs offered by ISVs. Next, line-of-business end users select widgets from catalogs such as the IBM InfoSphere™ MashupHub, and "wire together" the input and outputs from one widget to another. This makes it possible for an action occurring in one widget (such as user data entry, or events provided by back-end applications such as a change in presence status) to result in an activity taking effect in another. No software development skills are required by the line-of-business user, and the only tool they need to access the finished application is a standard web browser. In fact, a user can also start with an existing mashup as a starting point, and modify it for a specific at-the-moment need, even if that mashup only has value for a specific timeframe, such as during a specific event or situation.

For example, one widget could extract customer records from a data base and display them on a screen. Another widget could display a button controlling a phone, or presence and availability information for specific contacts such as customers or field engineers. The user clicks to select a customer record and then clicks on the phone button associated with an available field engineer to place a call to the customer. Each widget has well-defined inputs and outputs. In this example, the phone number portion of the output of the first widget forms the input to the second widget. There is no need to switch to another application to look up the phone number.

With all of the information visible on the screen and easily accessible, users can quickly assess how best to reach other staff members or customers. For instance, if the situation calls for immediate action, the user can automatically make a phone call based on the available presence of the target staff member or customer. If the presence indicates that the user is unavailable or busy, then SMS or email can be used as an alternate method to reach the desired target.

The combination of business information and communications means that the business user can click on a customer record or on a list of other staff members, view their availability and presence, and then click a button to access email, IM, SMS, or make a phone call to the selected person.