Several trends that have emerged in the past few years make me wonder whether we’ve taken steps forward or backward in terms of enterprise collaboration and productivity. The proliferation of mobile devices, the “bring your own device” phenomenon, the growing number of at-home and mobile workers, and the increasing globalization of businesses and the information that powers them — each of these trends has unique impacts on businesses. But together they also create a frenetic enterprise work environment where information overload is accelerating and our “enabling technologies” make it possible to work 24/7 whether we want to or not.

What if, amid the chaos, the average office worker could recapture five

to 10 minutes per hour throughout the workday — time that could be put

to other productive uses?

Awareness ties together key elements of today’s enterprise information

and communications technology to accomplish that objective.

Productivity? Or unbridled activity?

Information is coming at us today from all directions and is increasing in

volume by the second. Think about e-mails alone: How productive can

people be when they receive up to 50,000 e-mails per year? I personally

send and receive about 65,000. Add to that the 15,000 SMS messages that

people send and receive,1 especially the younger generations coming into

the workforce for whom such collaboration is second nature.

1 According to Pew Internet, “[U.S.] Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages

per day, with the median user sending or receiving 10 texts daily ... a notable increase from late 2009.”

“Americans and Text Messaging,” September 19, 2011, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/

Cell-Phone-Texting-2011/Main-Report.aspx.

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Awareness: Driving the next generation of productivity

A perspective by Brett Shockley

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With all these devices

and activities demanding

our attention, it’s easy

to waste a lot of time.

It also introduces

unbelievable complexities

in terms of enterprise

security, document

management, personal

and corporate messaging,

directories and

collaboration applications.

Other complicating dimensions are consumer and enterprise social networking,

as well as Web, voice and video collaboration, which have become part of our

everyday personal and, increasingly, professional lives. The number of places

we are expected to be in the physical and virtual worlds seems to increase

every time we look at our calendar. Even gaming has crossed the boundary

from personal entertainment to professional business applications, swapping

virtual weapons for more business-oriented tools such as spatial audio and

video and document sharing.

Add to these methods of collaboration the seemingly endless versions of

documents, slideshows, spreadsheets, pictures, and other structured and

unstructured content, and you wonder where all our time goes. Then consider

the desire of many people to improve their productivity by using an increasingly

wide range of new devices at work.

At a recent series of client meetings, I noticed that most attendees had tablets,

smartphones, e-readers and laptops. Many had several of each and moved

between them throughout the day.

Businesses also use a variety of soft phone, conferencing and social networking

tools, which makes it more difficult for employees to have a persistent and

efficient set of meetings and conversations with colleagues throughout the day.

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Presence does little to

increase the effectiveness

of real-time collaboration,

whether scheduled or ad

hoc, because participants

are still digging for the

relevant assets across

their collaboration media

and devices.

With all these devices and activities demanding our attention, it’s easy to waste

a lot of time. It also introduces unbelievable complexities in terms of enterprise

security, document management, personal and corporate messaging,

directories and collaboration applications.

If only we all could have administrative assistants

Avaya conducted a series of focus groups with executive administrative

assistants to understand how they leverage technology as they coordinate

their executives’ schedules. The results were fascinating and instructive in

terms of enterprise productivity.

Most of our executives have back-to-back meetings throughout the day. Their

executive assistants spend time leading up to each meeting reviewing relevant

e-mails, talking to other executive assistants and gathering required assets.

Assets include people who might be coming to the meeting in person; others

joining remotely; necessary documents and presentations; and even the

physical room in which the meeting will take place, whether by voice, Web

or video conferencing. Only after all of these assets are queued up together is

the meeting pushed to the executive. The objective is to make every minute of

the day count for the executive team.

Is this a unique scenario? Not really. Many professionals across the enterprise

go from meeting to meeting like this. The only difference is that few of those

professionals have administrative assistants to bring everything together to

make the meetings as productive as possible. So they waste a tremendous

amount of time locating relevant people, documents, contact information

and conversations and linking them to the current moment in time or calendar

event that happens next in their day.

The problem with presence

Businesses that specialize in unified communications and collaboration

technology have, over the past decade, attempted to make sense out of all

these real-time and ongoing conversations, with all their associated content,

across relevant devices and applications. Yet the reality is that we still largely

rely on the people involved to bring it all together.

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Avaya has developed

Avaya Awareness, an

“Awareness engine” that

reaches well beyond

presence to continuously

monitor and analyze

workers’ collaboration

activities across

modalities and over time.

“Presence services” have provided the first crude step toward improving

communications productivity. Presence has been used to make instant

messaging more productive and in some cases offers an idea if someone

is in a meeting or on a phone call.

However, in most cases the primary piece of information learned from

presence is whether people have touched their keyboard or mouse in the

past five minutes. Presence does little to increase the effectiveness of

real-time collaboration, whether scheduled or ad hoc, because participants

are still digging for the relevant assets across their collaboration media

and devices. Presence is important, but it’s just a start.

Effective and efficient collaboration requires AwarenessWhat if every worker had an administrative assistant? Someone who, like the

administrative assistants described above, is highly aware of what’s needed —

the relevant people needed for the meeting, the documents that need to be

shared, the physical or virtual location of the meeting, and other activities,

events and conversations that preceded the meeting but are relevant.

How much time does the average worker spend preparing for each meeting

in this way? Five, 10, 15 minutes? How many times do meetings start five to

10 minutes late or participants miss key portions of the meeting because

they are multitasking or focused on locating necessary information?

Awareness is a cornerstone of effective and efficient collaboration and,

fortunately, computers are great at multitasking. In fact, for several years

Avaya Labs has been conducting research on the use of contextual awareness

to enhance collaboration. Avaya has developed Avaya Awareness, an

“Awareness engine” that reaches well beyond presence to continuously

monitor and analyze workers’ collaboration activities across modalities and

over time. It looks at the people, conversations, information and event streams

that surround workers and the contextual relationships between them across

devices, applications and locations.

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Awareness allows

workers to move from

device to device, using

whichever is most

appropriate

for each current activity,

and bringing along the

people and other assets

most relevant to the

communication and

collaboration activity.

Awareness revolutionizes the way people collaborate. It makes telephone calls

and voice, Web or video conferencing more efficient and effective by enabling

workers to move smoothly and quickly from one to another — much as if they

had an administrative assistant with them, in the background, preparing them

for the next activity. Consider these examples:

Joining a conference

• From the desktop. When a calendar invite pops up on screen, it takes only

one click to join a conference with audio, Web and video access. The most

current version of documents needed for the collaboration are automatically

located in e-mail, on the hard drives or in a cloud-based document-sharing

environment and converted to an appropriate format for sharing on the PC,

Mac, iPad or Android tablet.

• A telephone, soft phone or mobile device. If a worker is simply joining an

audio conference, Awareness again delivers a much more efficient experience.

Rather than risking her life while trying to locate a meeting ID and password

while driving down the freeway, she simply dials her Awareness-driven personal

assistant. The application checks her calendar for current meetings and

automatically places her on the appropriate internal or external conference

bridge. If several calls overlap, the application offers the selection and all

that is required is a “Yes” to join.

Ad hoc collaboration

• Receiving calls. When a worker receives a call, a screen pop appears to show

who is calling, but all the documents, conversations, people and events

related to the worker and caller appear on screen as well. Want to bring others

into the call or escalate to a multimodal collaboration session? The relevant

people, documents, conversations and events dynamically reprioritize and

appear based on their relationships with the worker and each other.

• Initiating an unplanned collaboration session. If a worker needs to start a

collaboration session, the application leverages its awareness of his current

activities to quickly offer connections with one or more people most likely

to be relevant to the collaboration session. If the worker decides to discuss

a document or presentation, the application is aware of the most current

version most likely to be relevant and makes it immediately available

for sharing.

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Awareness tracks each worker’s collaboration activity across their many devices

and works together with other communications and IT applications to provide an

extraordinary user experience — context-aware sessions that are persistent over time

and portable across devices. Awareness allows workers to move from device to device,

using whichever is most appropriate for each current activity, and bringing along the

people and other assets most relevant to the communication and collaboration activity.

Importantly, Awareness operates without workers having to program anything. It

observes, learns and predicts who and what are relevant, supercharging the enter-

prise collaboration experience and making workers dramatically more productive.

A major next evolutionary step

In the past few years, presence technology has made tracking down people and

information easier, facilitating collaborative sessions for individual users. With

Awareness we’re elevating those capabilities so that entire groups of people benefit

from greater awareness in the workplace, helping them collaborate more efficiently

together. It’s a next logical evolutionary step in the convergence of IT and

communications, and the best part about it? It’s here today.

About the author

As senior vice president and general manager of Avaya Applications and Emerging

Technologies, Brett Shockley has responsibility for Avaya Contact Center and Unified

Communications applications portfolios and Avaya Emerging Technologies, including

Avaya Labs Research and Avaya cloud initiatives. Brett is an industry veteran with more

than 25 years of thought leadership in the telecommunications and contact center

markets at Avaya, Cisco and Spanlink Communications.

About AvayaAvaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions,

providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services

to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information, contact your Avaya

Account Manager or Authorized Partner or visit us at www.avaya.com.

© 2012 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, all trademarks identified by the ®, TM or SM are registered trademarks, trademarks or service marks,

respectively, of Avaya Inc.

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