The success of Internet and unified messaging services hinges on understanding corporate user behaviour. Unified messaging and its success as a business application could be impeded if solution providers take a technology-centric view and ignore the needs of the user.
"Technology once again threatens to kill a good thing by being too expensive, too complex and taking too long to implement," says Mike Renzon, managing director of speech recognition and messaging company Intelleca Vocalis. "Placing too much emphasis on cutting edge technology has already been a major contributing factor to the downfall of dotcoms and a number of Internet-based services.
"Businesses wanting to use this technology successfully should not be blown away by technology, but should rather opt for a solution that can be easily installed, incrementally developed, and which will have fast user acceptance."
Intelleca Vocalis has set up a hosted voice activated e-mail facility in South Africa accessed via an 082 number, where users can access their e-mail with voice commands (as well as reply) using a normal telephone or cellphone. Its SpeechMail service is already active through World Online, with ISPs DataPro, UUNET, The Internet Solution, and BCS-Net shortly offering this service to their corporate user base. Vocalis has already rolled out the SpeechMail service across the UK, Europe, the USA, and in now in Asia.
"The technology for implementing a turnkey unified messaging system is readily available, but mega-solutions such as these tend to be very costly to implement, they often demand user retraining on devices such as cellphones, business telephones, and even computers," says Renzon. "Experience has shown that people tend not to use a service if it demands major re-orientation."
A risk-free, fast entrance to the unified messaging world is easily achieved through working through a business` Internet partner using existing telecommunications, hardware, and software infrastructure in a proven and stable environment" says Renzon. "It makes sense to provide a simple, subscriber-based, easy-to-activate messaging service on an incremental basis adding functionality as users become familiar with existing services. Companies such as DataPro already have a Web-site on which DataPro customers can activate the service and manage their e-mail retrieval from a telephone or cellphone with no need for outside assistance, hardware or software investment, or special training."
Companies need not take an all or nothing approach to unified messaging! They should be determining which messaging solutions would work for their employees in making them more productive based on their working habits, behaviour, and dynamics. Retrieval of e-mail on the run may add huge value to your work force, while faxing to their PC`s may add none. Unified messaging in itself implies that everything is "unified", but the reality is that we`re seeing a lot of companies out there who`ve purchased extensive technology and a year down the line are still searching for business areas in which to apply large chunks of it. It is senseless to roll out functionality when it is simply not needed."
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