Summary: ‘Communications-Enabled Business Processes’ (CEBP) are a key application for voice and messaging APIs. This Briefing Report illustrates three new real world examples of integrating communications into end-user business applications using web services to access telco APIs. (February 2010, Foundation 2.0, Executive Briefing Service)
'Communications-Enabled Business Processes' (CEBP) is an optimisation technique used by business process designers that involves integrating real time communications such as voice messaging, online chat and SMS with existing software frameworks. It is a developer / end-customer application of telco APIs in Telco 2.0 business models.
In general, enterprise CEBP projects do not create new business processes or areas of business. Instead, they extend existing legacy applications making them more efficient and faster, and very often with higher overall quality. As a powerful addition, CEBP projects provide business metrics allowing managers to optimise processes in real time. From a technology perspective, CEBP is a blend between two normally disparate worlds: the real-time, arcane and difficult technology of the telephone and the thorny, legacy filled and customised enterprise software.
The in-store feedback service uses phones and text messaging to collect comments and complaints from retail customers using any cell phone. The decision support application provides mobile and remote decision makers the information they require to make critical business decisions without having to be at their desk. The resource tracking opportunity shows how phones can be used to monitor and manage the use of enterprise resources quickly, easily and at scale.
The term Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) is relatively new, but the need is as old as business itself. CEBP is an optimisation technique used by business process designers that involves integrating real-time communications such as voice messaging, online chat and SMS with existing software frameworks.
In general, enterprise CEBP projects do not create new business processes or areas of business. Instead, they extend existing legacy applications making them more efficient and faster, and very often with higher overall quality. In addition, CEBP techniques allow managers to measure business processes in real time, providing visibility into key business metrics that would be otherwise unavailable. From a technology perspective, CEBP is a blend between two normally disparate worlds: the real-time, arcane and difficult technology of the telephone and the thorny, legacy-filled and usually customised enterprise software.
Using CEBP techniques, system integrators and enterprise developers can realise productivity gains typically unavailable using other technology approaches, providing strong motivation for them to invest in such projects. Of course, dynamic connections between businesses and customers using phones are not new; the existing contact centre market is huge and mature.
CEBP is the next natural step in the development of this market, driven by advances in Internet and integration technologies, and can be viewed as roughly equivalent to the movement away from computer punch cards towards tape drives and hard disks: instead of requiring human beings to be present for every interaction, some business to human communications can be automated.
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