Chris Crosby

A big cheers to one of my favorite start-ups, DimDim (see blog post here). They just raised $6M in capital. Nice work guys. It demonstrates what’s possible if you come to market with a viable product in the right niche and execute well.  These guys didn’t come out of the gate as a “Web 2.0″ company trying to boil the ocean. They started small and grew organically through partners and beta customers until they worked out the bugs and kinks. My guess is that these guys will continue to execute well and get acquired by someone looking to get into the collaboration space to augment their existing apps (Google anyone?)

Here is a useful article for any software company considering using open source components in your applications. I can tell you from personal experience that if you think getting acquired is part of your exit strategy then you need to pay attention to what open source code may find its way into yours, because your acquirer certainly will. If you’re not planning on getting acquired, its still a good idea to understand what your legal exposures might be.

My suggestion is to make sure you document any third party (even commercial) code and how you’re using it across your applications; and then have an attorney review the appropriate license agreements.

OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:

A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.

The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,

 http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250×100&chl=Hello|World

returns the following image:

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.

Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.

When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.

I have been asked A LOT lately if the Latigent Business Intelligence Suite provides cradle-to-grave call reporting for Cisco ICM/ IPCC and/or Customer Voice Portal (CVP). The short answer is yes, we do.

Without giving away any of our, or Cisco’s, proprietary techniques you can refer to their Solution Reference Network Design (SRND) for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal, Release 4.x which I found with a little help from Google.

BlueVue provides a pretty flexible and easy to use filtering and search tool over Cisco ICM’s call detail data. For example, you can run a report for all calls that meet a certain criteria (I.E. Talk Time > 20 mins, or Abandoned in Queue after 60 mins, etc.), or you can search for a specific call by ANI (caller’s phone number) or ICM Call Variable value. You can also drill-down into what we call the “Call Life Report”, which is basically a formatted and visual picture of what transpired on each leg of the call.

Pretty cool, heh? If you have questions or want to see a demo, give me a shout.

Government Transparency is almost as big a buzzword as Web 2.0 lately. And for that matter, you would think the two would go hand-and-hand. With all of the killer technology available in our information age, one would think that it should be relatively straight forward to get a picture of what our government does in return for our tax dollars and votes.

The sad truth is that it is extremely difficult to decipher anything that goes on in Washington, from laws that are passed to how tax dollars are spent.

Jason recently pointed out an article on Why Congress needs version control. I think its a fantastic idea, and certainly serves as an example of how today’s technology can be applied to the governmental processes. However, I think we can go well beyond that.

I’ve spent the last several months scouring the net for what information is publicly available and from where. There are a number of government sites that make pieces of information available, and private sites that take those pieces of raw data and try to make something intelligent out of it.

For example:

• The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) makes available the donor records of everyone that contributes more than $200 to a politicians campaign. But who wants to download all that data and crunch it through excel? I tried, trust me its interesting stuff but tough to glean anything useful from it.
• GovTrack.US does a fantastic job of tracking every bill that hits the floor of the House and the Senate, complete with voting records of politicians. They even make it available in RSS feeds. This is cool, but as a standalone tool you can’t figure out much more than how many Post Offices Congress has named this year.
• Maplight is trying to marry these two concepts together and tie voting records with PAC contributions. That’s an admirable effort and I think with a little data modeling and consolidation we could use this as a starting point to gain some very useful knowledge.

The examples go on and on, and if you have some good ones, I’d love to see them. But the point is when you step back from all of this it starts to resemble a corporation, or “the enterprise”, with multiple data points and silo vendors trying to address individual application needs.

Enter Business Intelligence.

First we start with a data mart. We identify all the publicly available data points (there are far more available than I mentioned above), and we create a data model that does some cool things like create unique identifiers for congressmen and candidates and Bills that hit the floor, etc. It will take some leg work to get all of the ETL loads, or automated data pulls, set-up. But as the sites mentioned above have demonstrated this is not insurmountable.

The next step is the presentation layer. Once we have all the data and its modeled appropriately, the sky is the limit here. If built correctly, every U.S. citizen could have an almost real time dashboard on Congress, or run an ad hoc report on budgetary spending, or create a scorecard on their local Congressman, or… (more on these in a later post).

I think the key to this is to treat it like an open source project. So perhaps MYSQL and something like Pentaho are in order. This would keep commercial conflicts out of the equation and make people feel like they are more apart of the process.

I don’t see Washington creating a tool like this anytime soon, therefore we’ll have to take a step forward in doing it ourselves. Any takers?

politics

A few weeks ago, my wife Amy and I had the pleasure of meeting the newest addition to our family. My brother-in-law Jeff and his wife Pam welcomed thier new son Braden Scott Parma-Kelly to the world in Feb of this year. We couldn’t wait to meet the little fella, so we headed south to Austin, TX.

Not having children of our own yet, this was our first real “hands-on” exposure to the process of baby rearing. It was quite a sight as we fumbled through that first diaper change and bottle warming with Amy screaming “What do I do, what do I do?”. But by the end of the weekend we were self-proclaimed professionals.

As I reflected back on our weekend in Texas, I was able to draw some interesting parallels between raising babies and Business Intelligence (yes, I can find a metaphor or analogy in just about anything).  

So, allow me to introduce a new kind of BI, “Baby Intelligence”. Enjoy! 

1. Baby Activity Monitoring (BAM) - Most of you have heard of Business Activity Monitoring, which is the real time management of your  business transactions and performance . However, Braden kindly introduced me to the “baby monitor”, which is basically a one-way walkie talkie that you carry around the house while a baby is sleeping. This allows you to listen for any disturbance and activity. I couldn’t help but think that the monitor looked just like a gauge on a BlueVue Dashboard. I quickly learned that they worked the same way. The occasional two bars on the led monitor indicated a little restlessness that is apparently a part of Braden’s normal “sleep cycle”, but three bars or more means you better get your butt in gear or the thing is about to go off the charts…
2. Integrated Solutions - I’m a big advocate of efficiency in not only business and call centers, but in life. I often use this as my reasoning to invest in cool toys like iPods and Blackberry’s that make me more “proficient” (although I think my wife has caught on to me). And thanks to my brother-in-law Jeff, I have now discovered the modern marvel in baby efficiency: “the instant stroller”. The day we took Braden to the park for a walk I observed Jeff take the car seat out of their new highly safety rated, four-door SUV and drop it right onto a stroller frame. My jaw dropped in amazement at the simplicity of the set-up as there was no longer a need to un-strap the kid from one overly sophisticated plastic bucket and transplant him into another. Brilliant!  
3. Key Performance Indicators and the Baby Scorecard- In a call center there are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics such as First Call Resolution and Schedule Adherence that measure performance and areas that require attention. These are often accumulated into an Agent Scorecard that can be used to manage the performance of your team. However, through my Sister-in-Law Pam, I was introduced to an entirely new set of very important metrics, which I will refer to as “The Baby Scorecard”.  These include key indicators such as: “is his diaper wet?” , “does he “stink?”, “that was a quality burp”, “how long was his nap?”. I must also mention that the term “Blow Out” now has an entirely new meaning to me…    
4. Smile - Even if you have no clue what’s going on around you

-”Uncle” Chris

Have you seen the Verizon commercial where the two guys download the 80’s tune “Rock the Casbah”, but instead of singing along to the correct lyrics they misinterpret them into something completely different? Over the course of the commercial they botch the chorus into “lock the cashbox” and “stop the cat box”, which takes a perfectly good rock song and makes it complete gibberish.

The commercial ends with the narrator stating:

“You don’t have to understand your music to understand how to get it all from your PC to your Phone” 

Albeit, I think the commercial is funny and is reminiscent of my grade school days running around the house playing air guitar and trying to belt-out Van Halen tunes (ok, maybe that was last week); it got me thinking about something not so funny: how often I see reports and metrics that end-up getting botched because somebody misinterpreted a few lyrics along the way.

Unfortunately in the contact center, you do have to understand your data to understand how to get it all from it’s source into your reports, dashboards and scorecards.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Average Talk Time is almost always calculated as (Total Talk Time/Calls Answered). Seems simple enough right? We’ll, not always…

Some of you may have noticed in the Avaya CMS tables there are two fields that represent “total talk time”: ACDTIME and I_ACDTIME

According to the CMS documentation:

ACDTIME = The talk time of all ACDCALLS (calls answered) for an interval.

I_ACDTIME = The length of time during the collection interval that agents were on split/skill ACD calls.

What this means is that ACDTIME represents the total talk time for calls that were physically answered in that interval vs. I_ACDTIME which tallies up all of the time for a half-hour interval that agents were actually talking.

In this example, you would use ACDTIME for an average talk time calculation and I_ACDTIME for an occupancy calculation. Interchanging those two fields incorrectly in a report changes the tune completely…

Another common misinterpretation I see is in the Cisco ICM/IPCC Enterprise world. Cisco makes available both Calls Answered and Calls Handled for reporting purposes. These terms are often interchanged in verbal context, however according to the Cisco database schema:

Calls Answered = Number of calls answered by agents associated with this skill group during the half-hour interval.

Calls Handled = The number of inbound ACD calls answered and wrap-up completed by agents associated with this skill group during the half-hour interval.

So, Calls Answered are pegged to the half hour interval when the call is physically answered, and Calls Handled pegs when the call is actually finished. The difference seems subtle, and over the course of a day the grand total should be the same (except for calls running over midnight).

But what happens if you feed your WFM application Calls Handled instead of Calls Answered? You got it, inaccurate call arrival patterns and forecasts. What would seem like a relatively minor botch will end up having a significant impact downstream on your Service Levels and staffing efficiencies.

I remember as a kid cracking open my first cassette tape that actually had the lyrics printed on the inside of the cover. This was a novel concept as I no longer had to decipher them on my own. This same concept applies to your reporting. Most vendors publish a document that explains, like the examples above, the meaning and usage behind their database elements.

When designing a datamart or report, it’s critical that you reference these documents as your lyrical road map. Also review them whenever you upgrade your ACD or WFM system, as often times fields will change with new product releases.

The best way to avoid these types of pitfalls is to consult an expert or somebody that is familiar with each vendors’ nuances and understands your desired end game requirements. (cough, Latigent)

Before you know it, you’ll be Rockin the Casbah…

-Chris

In case you missed it, Verint made an unexpected play last week to acquire Witness. It’s safe to say that when most of us heard the news we paused for a moment and thought to ourselves,  “HUH?”

Over the course of the last week I’ve had no less than a dozen conversations with industry analysts and vets speculating the why’s and motives behind this unexpected buy.

Although, despite of all the useless speculation, what really matters is how this merger impacts you, me, and this industry we love so much.

So here’s how I see it:

The biggest sector that will be impacted is call recording. As little as two years ago there were a ton of options to choose from when purchasing or replacing these types of solutions, now Verint WILL dominate the field.

How the ‘Verint/Witness’ product integration and end-of-life strategies play out is yet to be told and will certainly cause a great deal of short term customer (and prospect) confusion. My hope is that the rival companies will put the swords away and take a true “best of breed” approach. I can’t tell you which recording product is better, but what I can tell you is that they need to:

• figure out how to take the best of both
• create a new best-of-breed
• offer both sets of legacy customers a smooth migration path

Many other merger kings have fallen short in this arena and lost in the end. (need we mention Aspect with RightForce and eWFM)

My advice to the new combined customer base is to pay close attention to the new product roadmap. Witness spent a great deal of time building the Blue Pumpkin integration into their Impact 360 line, so if you’re being sold this solution today make damn well sure you know what its going to look like 24 months from now. Start asking questions about where and how all the moving parts will integrate. You won’t get answers to all of them now, but get them on your sales reps’ radar screen. And be relentless before you start writing checks.

By all means, if you are in the market for call recording make sure you understand the new landscape prior to purchasing either legacy application. There are other non-monolithic vendors out there that may prove to be more agile alternatives.

On a side and often overlooked note, vendor consolidation has downstream effects on the entire industry. For example, call center exhibit halls are shrinking. Eighteen months ago a demo hall would have had Verint, Opus Group, Mercom, Blue Pumpkin, Witness and Amae Software (and I’m sure I’m missing a couple others). Today these six vendors all fall under the Verint booth. AND this is just one company’s consolidation, for more carnage you only have to look at the Concerto/Aspect acquisition binges, or Cisco or… This impacts everything from conference agendas to the often watered down magazine “articles” you read…

 -Chris