Many fields and endeavors enjoy the benefits of using templates to provide ways of building solutions quickly. Software engineering greatly benefits from the development of design patterns, allowing the designer to see effective strategies early in the development process. From nearly the first class, Karate students are taught templates of punching and kicking - three and four move combinations that accelerate their learning and enable them to create an infinite amount of responses to an inbound attack. As our industry approaches the new field of light weight telephony application development, it is useful to come up with some templates for their application. Although architectures technical approaches are important to understand and socialize, business templates are probably more important right now, because we are early in our understanding of how and where this technology can be applied. In short, when we are looking at using voice mashup technology, what should we be looking for? Where and when do they make business sense? There are a few, here’s one to start off with.
Voice mashups make sense when you are trying to extend a business process outside the firewall. By and large, business process is enforced through training manuals, paper forms and computer based interfaces. What happens when none of these devices are available? In particular, let’s look at what happens when you have a business process that involves a customer interaction. You cannot explicitly train your customers.
Customers tend to dislike using paper forms, and, for “bricks” businesses, getting them to use a computer based interface is problematic. For both paper and computer interfaces, it is difficult to effectively “loop” customers into a business process. Here’s a place where voice mashups might be an effective tool. For instance, if your process required verification from a customer (let’s say to make sure that a part arrived for an appliance repair), you could use a voice mashup to call your customer to obtain the verification. This extends your process outside the firewall inexpensively and securely, and uses a mechanism that is ubiquitous and palatable.
External customer interaction is just one way of extending process outside of the firewall. For mobile or remote workers, similar benefits exist. To extend the example, using a voice mashup might be a more effective, faster and more accurate way of the appliance repair man to record how much time he spent at a job site, and what parts he used on the job. Although smart phone solutions exist for these applications, voice mashups may be a superior solution not only because they leverage any phone (even the customer’s black phone), but also because they provide centralized control of the application behind the firewall, giving the IT staff a more cost effective administration strategy, and they don’t require the IT staff to support yet another client on the phone.
This template extends well to other situations, including partnerships, sales channels, logistics, remote monitoring and emergency services. There are other places where voice mashups work well, such as decreasing response time or in facilitating a one-to-many communication to the general public. This particular example, though, highlights that voice mashups provide enough value to the designer that they should be a staple of every enterprise process. So, when you are looking at your enterprises’ application, and you need to involve a customer - look at voice mashups. They might be the tool you need.