Last week, we touched on a business template for voice mashups: extending process outside of the firewall. The phone is an effective tool that allows enterprise applications to interact with a human being when they are on the road, are in an insecure environment or when they don’t happen to work for you. Voice mashups provide a cost-effective technical approach that enables enterprise software to reach out across the firewall.
Here’s a second place where voice mashups shine: eliminating delays in the business process. The success of the Blackberry is directly attributable to the fact that it reduces the delay between when an e-mail is sent and when it is read. The elimination of this delay makes the executive, and therefore the process that he’s involved in, faster. Unfortunately for RIM, the blackberry is not universally deployed in the enterprise, never mind the general population. Adding voice and real time messaging into the business process has the same effect. Nothing is faster than picking up the phone and calling; voice mashups allow your enterprise software to harness this power. If anything, as businessmen, we probably fear the wide scale deployment of technology such as this, as it may quickly become our masters. Like all powerful technologies, good judgment must accompany good design.
UPS provides excellent examples of how voice mashups make businesses run faster. We’ve already discussed how UPS calls residential customers the day before a package is delivered that requires a signature. UPS also checks to see if packages are addressed to a known address. (The StrikeIron marketplace provides this type of information as a web service today.) When a package doesn’t have a known address, it simply calls the phone number of the recipient to verify if the shipping address is valid. It can also call the sender for the same information. This kills two birds with one stone : packages get there more reliably, and both the sender and recipient can be notified more quickly when they don’t.
Voice mashups are the perfect architecture for this application. Sending a voice message to any PSTN phone is quite simple when it’s only a web services call that initiates it. The enterprise developers at UPS did not need to call the telephone guy to configure anything (although, for efficiency and cost, they could have.) It was a simple addition to an important enterprise application.
Voice has an immediacy that e-mail lacks. When applied to critical business processes, and especially when applied to the business process as outside the firewall or the payroll, it can speed up business.
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