Today I finally got the last piece I was missing for my daily video communications: the usb camera that attaches directly to my IP phone at my desk, making it a personal video communications device. Click on the image for a full-resolution image, the quality of video is great! Great, so I can now have two-way video conferences (I could receive video before but not send) instead of simple and boring audio-only calls. I do think video will be the third big thing in communication channels after the telegraph and the phone. And as with the previous two, the amount of information we are able to transmit per conversation is bigger each time. It all started with a few lines of text that was asynchronous. Then we added our own voice with all the embedded info it contains (pitch, tone, pauses, etc) plus “real-time”. Now we have images and motion too. The two questions that come to mind regarding how well we will adopt this third wave of communications are: as we are able to mimic how we communicate face to face through technology, are we changing the old habits we grew using the old technology? And also, what do we need to do to ensure video interactions deliver their full potential? On the first question, we need to remind ourselves that traditional phone service has been (and still is) around for a long time. As Clay Shirky puts it: “technologygets socially interesting when it is technically boring” . Everyone today  knows how to dial everyone and how to talk to him/her. But in doing so, we have adopted the telephone so well that it might be difficult to change our habits when switching to video. Consider the habit of multitasking when on the phone, for instance. Or think about if your work environment  has the adequate conditions (light, quietness, “visual noise”) for a video communication. And what about privacy when not only you have to keep audio to yourself but also video images too? Some of those questions serve as the background for a few things I think we need to check that relate to the second question on  adoption: Make sure calling someone on video is just as easy as calling him/her on the phone: configure your systems so that video numbers to call are like phone numbers. What’s more: start thinking of an single dialplan in which a person has one number to be reached at and the system will determine whether the terminal has video capabilities or not. In short: let the system do the connection in the background while the user keeps just dialing someone Choose the right terminal for the right environment and the right people. Maybe not everyone that works on shared desks in an open area will like to have a video terminal on the desk. Maybe they will prefer dedicated quiet rooms with video systems. On the other hand, not every video-enabled room has to be 15 sq meters and a wooden table with leather chairs in it. There is no one-size fits all with video and so chose a solution that allows for a variety of terminals. Think how you will do video with people outside your organization. While enabling internal communications for video is great, the greatest impact for your business will come from interactions with customers, partners and distributors. Think how your solution will be able to call them on video. Listen to the users. Make sure they feel comfortable but most important, make sure they understand why video is benefitial for them. Address their concerns on privacy. Take one step at a time. Don’t try to extend the solution to mobile users, telecommuters, etc at first. Those environments are challenging in themselves already as to put another layer of potential problems on top. Learn as you go. Video is a great technology and I truly think it changes communications for better. And I believe its power resides in that it puts people closer to one another. But that hasn’t been the case for years and that’s exactly where the source of most concerns from users can come from. Cultural adoption is a slower process than technical integration. The more information a communication system can tell about us, the more cautious we tend to be. Work with that in mind, understand it and don’t ignore it. Jose This is a cross-post from the original article at http://theinternethose.com ... View more

It's obvious that we need to interact with our peers for the majority of our daily tasks at work. It's hard to imagine a single job today that could be done in isolation, with the exception of maybe being the host of the Golden Globe awards this year :-). With the need of working in groups comes the need to collaborate and do it effectively, something the new technologies all aim to do. Social networks are amongst those solutions but one question comes to mind about the effectiveness of such ones inside an enterprise environment. How do we make sure these social collaboration tools allow for true and productive group working? How do we avoid the "noise" and maybe the not-so productive conversations and interactions that might arise from deploying a social collaboration network in our company? How then we make sure we make the most of the time we have to achieve our goals? From my experience as a user of social networks and also as a worker in a company that depends heavily on getting the right people to collaborate to get the work done, I believe every system, solution, or product designed to accomplish useful interactions must have two features: presence and identity. Presence allows you to see who is available when. If available, it also tells you what's the best way to get in touch with that person. That alone is a good enough reason to deploy some sort of solution that by itself saves quite some time when doing a task that involve others. How much time you usually spend trying to speak/talk/chat to someone that can help? And how much time you spent first looking for that person? Presence is one of the first things I need today to work more efficiently. Identity gives you the assurance that the person you're talking to is indeed that specific person and no other. But the point about trust and security is not the one I'm focusing on. Identity drives also accountability as someone's contribution can be traced back to the person for good or bad. Sometimes there is the concern that social communities installed in an enterprise environment would produce some negative effects and drive people away from goals and objectives, deriving conversations and interactions into chit-chats rather than productive conversations. Being able to hold people accountable for their contributions not only solves this problem, but also ensures that credit goes to the ones that contribute the best (and often the most), which is another potential problem some people argue against social contribute environments.   So, to resume, what I think are two features that will make your enterprise collaboration recipe tasty for users are first being able to check who can help you at a certain time and second, being able to ensure people are who they say they are. Of course, main ingredients are not in this picture, but with these two you can at least make an eatable meal.   Jose This article is a re-post of the http://theinternethose.com blog site. ... View more

New year, new resolutions. Or older resolutions re-vamped and re-energized to make sure we follow them. Whatever the case is, one thing I've promised myself to do this 2011 is to write more: more often but also (and equally if not more important) more in terms of length of writings. Why and what it has to do with collaboration and technology? Keep on reading. It is often said that we will be the same next year except for the books we read and the people we meet. Very true. The former allows us to learn, to discover, to increase our "database", to become more knowledgeable about something. The second activity is a fundamental part of not only collaborating but also of growing ourselves and it deserves a dedicated article some other time. But once reading is done, and before meeting others, I believe there is something that increases even more our personal value: writing. Right from the very first moment we want to write something, it's because we consider we have something interesting. Something to put on paper (or e-paper nowadays) so that we keep it in a way; so that we take it out of our heads, which we consider volatile, to a more solid platform; so that we can, given the interest, share it with others; so that we will, and this is the important bit, think about it, structure it, give it a shape and elaborate on it. This is where the true value of writing resides. The exercise of putting a thought in the form of words and phrases requires us to think. And with that comes a ton of good consequences: we go to the bottom of our topic or idea as we need to explain it to others, we realize of some aspects we didn't think at first, we analyze the matter from different angles and, maybe, we discover that what we thought about makes no sense at all and that we'd better go back to reading. Even in this last case, we have exercised our brain for good. It's a beautiful process and really the main reason why I decided to write. It feels awesome to perceive your brain working, connecting, running. Sometimes you just wish you could type at the same speed as you're processing thoughts. It is after creating something yourself that you can then add value to others. All the above sounds very good but there are some conditions that need to be present for the process to happen completely. First, as with every activity, you become better by practicing. That means doing it regularly. Second, and here is again a similarity to physical exercise, it needs to last enough every time you do it so you get the benefits. Writing something quickly doesn't activate your brain. It actually releases it from that idea/thought (that's why we write down to-dos and shopping lists no?). If you want to extract the juice out of that idea, you need to dedicate some time to elaborate on it. Otherwise it becomes simply a status update, a comment, a line that won't be likely to spark anything in others as it did in you. This is occurring today in the internet and is one of the reasons some people hate micro-blogging services like Twitter. It's just too simple to post something and because of brevity, much of the content is noise, or information you can live without. As a final example, while writing this small piece, a handful of ideas came to my mind related to this topic. Most of them are questions, but I'm sure tackling them one by one will not only help me produce answers, but also further questions to keep me thinking. And that's how we progress no? Jose This article was firstly posted on http://theinternethose.com blog site. ... View more

Just recently YouTube celebrated its fifth anniversary and looking back how they have grown, the stats are thrilling: they now have more than 2,000,000,000 visits a day, users upload 24hrs of video every minute and it’s the 3rd most visited website. Hulu (a web site that offers video streaming of programs, films and other video content) has grown in one year from 5.5 million visits a day to about 8.3 million visits today. That might not be a big number you might say, but the service it’s only available in the US. On another scale, but closer to where I live, all TV channels in Spain are moving to provide their contents in the form of video streaming to users whenever and wherever they want. All the above probes that video is finally becoming a technology that the user population is adopting as a way to communicate better and richer. Companies like Cisco have advocated that video will be/is the new revolution that will both allow people to better collaborate as well as increase the network traffic and requirements of the underlying technologies and equipment. Even though I fully agree with the above statement, I’m also taking it with a pinch of salt as there are a few things I believe need to be taken into account for that to happen. Video is a phenomenal communication channel because it allows us to capture elements of a communication that are usually not there with other means like email or a voice call. I’m sure you know that, on any conversation, 70% of the information is in the context while only 30% is in the message itself. What that means is that whenever we’re using video, we have to take into account how the other elements affect the message or the information we’re trying to transmit. Is the posture of the main communicator the adequate? Is the background set so that it doesn’t distract the audience? How’s the lighting and the overall quality of the image? Are the gestures and body language giving a different message than what’s being said? More often that not, I’ve seen videos posted on websites aimed to enrich the message given but effectively discouraging me from watching them because some or all of the mentioned aspects were not considered. There is a fine line between a fresh, cool video that someone takes and uploads with no editing and a painful experience of getting a fuzzy headache because the camera seems to stand on top of a laundry machine. So, as with anything that has the power to do more, there comes the responsibility to do it properly. Video can and will change the way we communicate but it does require a little extra effort from our side to make the whole experience a good one so....Lights, Camera....ACTION! Jose ... View more

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of having your users in mind when designing your Unified Communications solution for your company. UC is a technology that touches everyone in a company and one of the few (if not the only one) with which users interact directly by themselves. It is therefore very important to make sure that you know the needs, expectations and behavior of your users towards communication solutions in order to guarantee the success of the deployment. Now, as you can’t bring every single user’s opinion and feedback into your project team, who do you select to help you? Who are the so-called “power users” in your organization? And once you identified them, how do you incorporate their input into the project goals? In this post, I’m going to try and share some recommendations based on what I’ve seen at customers. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive list and I’m sure I’m missing some of the groups that you at your company consider vital. If so, please do take a couple of minutes and comment. Right, so, who are some power users you surely want to have on your side when attacking a UC deployment? Executive Assistants: think of the volume of communications an exec admin needs to process daily. Think of the importance of those communications. And now think of her as the front-end, gateway and gatekeeper to your company executives that filters what’s important and what is less critical. And last, think how close they are to the sponsors of your project in terms of giving direct and very honest feedback about the solution deployed. Executives: Even though these users might have assistants that handle their calls, messages, etc, they are still using your system and when they do, it better works. So reliability comes first but what comes second? Features. Make sure you know what’s the killer application/feature they want and then make sure you enable it to them first. They meet a lot of people (and important people) throughout the day so the word-of-mouth power they have is immense. Account Managers: in other words, sales people that meet customers and ultimately bring deals to your company. If the UC solution deployed doesn’t allow them to do their job quicker, easier or more effectively, you’ll have a hard time justifying the cost of the solution and having a good ROI. Receptionists, Call Center Agents: for obvious reasons, you better include their needs/expectations in your project and ensure the right features are provided to these users. At the end of the day, it all comes down to people who either use the system a lot or those who only use certain features but have a lot of “power” to influence other key stakeholders of your company. Did I miss anyone? Can you think of a group of users that you had to include in your project to ensure success? If so, share it please! ... View more

There’s been a recent study by Frost & Sullivan (Meetings around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration) sponsored by Verizon and Cisco that aims at quantifying the benefits of deploying Collaboration Solutions versus the cost of them. Now, even though the main topic of the study is to try and understand how improvements in collaboration can be measured and compared (and so they’ve developed a new concept called ROC, Return On Collaboration) I’m going to talk here about another index that I find as interesting as the ROC. It’s called the Collaboration Index and aims to measure the degree of which a company collaborates and how that collaboration impacts company performance. The index is built from two main components: ·       Culture and Structure of a company: which includes Culture Openness and Structure Decentralization ·       Collaborative Technology: which includes the use of Collaborative Technology for Strategy Implementation and the use of Collaborative Technology for Strategic Planning Which of the two you think it’s the bigger contributor? This might be the easy question and if you went for “Culture and Structure of a company” you’re right. Now the more difficult one: by how much? In order words, how much more important is the culture and structure of a company compared to the Collaborative Technology they implement? You’ll be surprised: as much as 5 times more. Having a technical background myself, I always thought there was nothing that a good technology or solution couldn’t change. “Give me the right technology and I’ll solve your problem” was my motto. Well, since those days I learnt that there are some things that technology alone can’t improve. And the degree with which people collaborate between each other is one of those, if not the most visible example. You can’t force humans to use a device to communicate better if all of the other components of the process don’t support that communication: How good is to have a last-generation mobile device if you are not allowed to call 2 nd -level managers directly? Or how good is your TelePresence solution if only VPs can use it? Does it make any sense to enforce the usage of video if Webex calls are always scheduled having only one time zone in mind? While products, solutions and technologies definitely help making our lives easier, we shouldn’t forget that there are other elements that have equal or higher impact on how well and how much we collaborate. In our recent Collaboration launch, you can see that technology is only one of the components, but we also think that we can help you changing some of the other factors in the equation to help you and your company perform better. When working with customers and partners, we as Advanced Services also look into the other dimensions of collaboration, providing recommendations on how those could be modified to have an overall solution that meets not only technical requirements but also helps people to communicate better. ... View more

Unified Communications (UC) is a unique technology in the way all users have a direct exposure to it. It might even be the only one with such a degree of intimacy. Think about the traditional core technologies (routing&switching): do users really care about what protocol routes their web traffic? Not likely. Is it vital for them to know whether multicast is being implemented in Dense Mode or Sparse Mode? I doubt it. And I'm referring here to the vast majority of users of course. Granted the IT technical staff will have these questions very present when operating the network but does the executive assistant of your vice-president going to ever ask about those? At most, she will notice whether the network is down or whether it's slow at some times during the day, but that's far away from using the internals of the solution. Now think about UC. It's something that reaches everyone to the last degree. Do users notice if the conferencing feature doesn't work? Oh yes. Are they concerned if the dial plan is missing a set of numbers? You bet. Will they send feedback on the way phones operate? Certainly. Unified Communications is a technology exposed to all of your user community. What's more, the success or failure of the rolling out of a particular solution is based on how well your end users adopt it. This exposure to everyone in your company, from the IT support personnel to the assistant of the vice-president, makes it necessary to include your users in your project plan. And this is again very different from planning a change in your routing protocols. In those type of projects, users won't play a key role in the way you plan the different phases. But in the case of UC, you need to involve them at an early stage and define specific tasks for them to contribute. I'm not only talking about the "end user training" phase which usually happens at the very end of the implementation when everything is designed and configured already (leaving small room for change). Sure users need to know how to operate the new phones, systems, etc. I'm talking about early phases of the project where the design of some features is being worked out. To guarantee the success and the adoption of the UC solution deployed, you need to bring the "voice of the user" to those early phases and make sure the requirements, requests and needs are listened to and taken into account. What's more, you need to identify your "power users" and really give value to their opinions, as they're the ones that use the system to its last feature. Think again about the example of the executive assistant of your vice-president. She is a power user not only because of the hours she spends working with the solution, but also because of the direct line of feedback she has into your management structure. How do you make sure your users are taken into consideration when designing the system? How can you integrate their feedback? There are a number of things I've seen in customers that have worked very well: Look in your user community for power users, select a few that would like to participate in the roll-out and make them part of your project team Invite that group to the design workshops and activities that discuss items that will impact users directly (for instance, the implementation of a particular feature) Make them part of the pilot, collect their feedback and make them feel they're understood Use those power users to help  spreading the word about the new system and its advantages Communicate, communicate and communicate. Not only to those power users, but also to the rest of the      organization. Share the progress of the implementation. Give information about new features at the right pace, so users don't feel overwhelmed. These are just some thoughts collected from customers that have implemented UC solutions successfully with a great user adoption. It's not an exhaustive list and I'm sure there are many other ideas that can be shared. What, from your experience, can you do to engage users better? What can you do to improve the adoption of a new UC solution? Please leave your comments and continue the discussion! ... View more