Feature Story

March 5, 2007

By David Barry, News@Cisco

If physicians were equipped with mobile devices on their belts that were hooked into a Unified Communications (UC) system, what might they be able to accomplish that they can't today?

"They'll be able to reach other physicians and specialists immediately and eliminate the phone tag that costs hours of time and impacts patient care," says Joe Brickweg, infrastructure director for the information systems department at Wisconsin-based Marshfield Clinic, one of the nation's largest private multi-specialty group medical practices. "Once we deploy Cisco UC-enabled Blackberrys, physicians will use the presence feature to immediately identify if a physician is available and how best to reach him or her at that moment."

Brickweg envisions a situation where a pediatrician notices a troubling symptom while examining a child and uses the Cisco UC presence feature on the Blackberry to quickly find a specialist and engage in a phone or video session immediately.

"Speed is very important in these situations and unified communications with presence and mobility could dramatically improve our physicians' ability to collaborate."

"We see presence as the dialtone of the 21st century," says Brent Kelly, senior analyst & partner at Wainhouse Research, LLC, a Massachusetts-based market research firm specializing in the unified communications and rich media conferencing fields. "This is how we're going to reach out and contact people. It will let us know what context our colleagues are working in and if they can actually take a phone call or if it would be better to just send an Instant Message, based on what they are doing and what device they have available"

Unified Communications Comes of Age

Unified Communications refers to a broad range of capabilities that includes IP telephony, presence, integrated voice and email messaging, video and audio conferencing, and instant messaging. But while many of these tools have been around in one form or another for some time, only recently has the necessary back-end infrastructure and client interfaces matured to allow them to be used seamlessly together. Today, users can quickly and easily access all of the communications and collaboration tools they need when they need them from wherever they are.

"We are now entering the third phase of convergence," says Barry O'Sullivan, vice president and general manager of the IP Communications Business Unit at Cisco. "The first phase was the convergence of media, including voice, video and data on the same network. The second was enabling users to access these services from many locations including in the office, the home, or at a coffee shop. Now we're looking at convergence of the user experience where everything is integrated and at the fingertips of the user. Using the network as a platform, this is all possible today"

Quick Escalation of a Collaborative Session

The power of this convergence can be seen in a typical scenario that might occur today at a company with the Cisco Unified Communications system. A knowledge worker needs to reach another company employee. The worker could pick up the phone and dial the co-worker, but there is a high chance the call would go to voicemail (some analysts estimate that 60 to 70 percent of calls go into voice mail). Instead, the worker looks at the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator application on his PC screen and immediately sees the worker's name and availability. The presence feature shows that the other worker is available by instant messaging, so an instant message is sent, establishing contact. After a few back-and-forth messages, it's determined that a more in-depth conversation is required and the worker clicks on the phone icon to instantly dial the other party. A voice conversation ensues. After a few moments the two workers realize they need to share a recently created PowerPoint presentation. By clicking on the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace icon in the Personal Communicator interface, they automatically invoke a web collaboration application to share the presentation.

In moments, these workers have created a productive, media rich, collaborative session, easily escalating communications capabilities as their needs warranted. This convergence of media types and applications at the user interface level is what many believe will usher in a new era of powerful collaboration.

"A key to this scenario is the new client technology that provides users with ad hoc access to any communication or collaboration capability anytime they need it," says Kelly. "But equally important is what's occurring on the back end with telephony, web, and audio conferencing systems seamlessly integrating with IM and presence systems. In the unified communications arena, Cisco is one of the few companies where you can get everything you need--the network platform, the telephony piece, the web collaboration, audio, video, unified messaging--and it all works together in a seamless way."

Video in Selective Applications Initially

Another important component of unified communications is video. While many analysts expect that video will grow in popularity as cultural inhibitions are overcome, personal video will see slow, but steady adoption in the broad market. In certain vertical markets, however, such as financial services and medical, interest in video is growing quickly.

"A very large financial services firm told me recently that personal video is turning out to be a big plus for the firm," says Kelly.

The firm uses video for its international calls with other bank employees in Singapore and London. Each employee is typically at their desktop and appears to others in a 'Hollywood Squares' type of format. With video, the meeting initiator can tell if people are listening and paying attention, or if they are distracted.

"Video is creating a different quality of experience because everybody knows they are on video and this increases the level of interaction, attention, and cohesiveness," says Kelly.

Marshfield Clinic also is interested in one of Cisco's newest high-end video technologies, TelePresence, which uses breakthrough innovations in audio and ultra-high definition video to create an 'in-person' experience over the network. "We're looking at the incredible realism of TelePresence to enable physicians to meet with patients who may be hundreds of miles away," says Brickweg. "The physician will be able to see a life size picture of the patient. If the patient has a rash on the back of his hand, for example, the physician could zoom in and closely study a lesion and make a diagnosis on the spot with great accuracy."

Controlling Availability?

While developments like these are harbingers of a new collaborative era in which barriers to communications disappear, Kelly also sounded a cautionary note.

"In this drive to make everybody readily accessible to one another, we must also pay attention to the issue of people being too accessible and becoming distracted. This would actually hurt productivity. We find that if presence and IM are not controlled people end up giving 'continuous partial attention ' to a number of threads or tasks simultaneously. Thus, we also need tools which will allow 'find me, follow me, but hide me' capabilities to protect us from becoming too available."

David Barry is a freelance journalist located in Princeton, NJ.