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Phil Fasano was well positioned to give a business-level view of communications technology in his VoiceCon San Francisco keynote this morning. Fasano is senior VP and CIO at Kaiser Permanente, and he said at the outset that “information technology is the differentiator” in the health care market, where Kaiser uses technology to drive prevention, which in turn is the engine of cost reduction for health care providers.

Prevention is the “single focus” in everything Kaiser does, and by automating all patient records, the company was able to use this massive online resource as the source for communications that go out proactively, reminding patients about needs around prescription refills, follow-up, etc.

The transition to IP communications did involve some concrete technology transition and attendant cost savings. Namely, Kaiser went from:

• 450 PBXs to 60
• 250 messaging systems to 60
• 150 wireless voice systems to 0
• 150 IVR systems to 15
• 120 ACDs to 15

The result was a 7%-10% savings on telephony costs.

During Q&A, Fred Knight asked Fasano how he built the IT organization for this effort. Fasno responded that Kaiser’s 6,000-strong IT organization includes Business Information Officers who are “absolutely aligned with line-of-business officers,” one of the most direct such associations we’ve seen among VoiceCon end user speakers. As for the bulk of the IT staff, much of these are “focused entirely on the technology,” and an ongoing effort is made to keep them focused on members’ needs and how members want to interact with the company.

Finally, Fasano said Kaiser tries as much as possible to standardize to as few vendors as possible, adding, “The price tag of variability is high.” When Fred Knight harkened back to this statement during Q&A, and asked if it was at odds with the notion that Unified Communications requires multiple vendors, since “no one can do it all,” Fasano said it’s prudent to spread your risk by avoiding reliance on a single vendor. But, he added, he believes Kaiser has too many vendors in some areas, and his goal is to consolidate down to 2-3 major vendors in each major technology area.

***

This morning’s vendor keynote was provided by Bruce Morse of IBM, whose most compelling demo came when his demo team built “voice mashups” on the fly. This was accomplished in a Web Services environment where IBM was able to take feeds from anything from Domino servers to Excel spreadsheets to create a mashup in which the user can more effectively track developments with a customer. Specifically, the scenario featured a news feed customized with the names of companies, who in the demo are those that the end user sells his product to. The user then adds to the mashup a spreadsheet where the user would have his contacts for each of these companies, as well as a link to the directory in which their phone numbers are stored.

The result is a mashup where the user clicks on a piece of news about the customer company–presumably one that suggests a sales opportunity–and clicking on the news feed brings up the information for the contact at that company.

The context for this demo was in Bruce Morse’s presentation of IBM as a company that can enable communications and collaboration that yields business value. In addition to the mashup demo, Morse showed capabilities within Lotus Sametime that let users share screens and do screen grabs within their Instant Messaging interface, and others that let users find colleagues who are “experts” in particular areas by linking into Lotus Connections social software. Being able to link into Connections from the IM interface lets the user find out not only how to reach someone in a contact list, but what communities that person belongs to in the Connections system, which may give an idea of where that person’s expertise lies.

***

So we wrap up tomorrow with panels on UC Architectures and Mobility. We’ve been fortunate to see strong traffic on the show floor, which we hope is a sign that, as difficult as times are, enterprise decision-makers are committed to keeping up with market developments and understanding what’s out there.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Equipment, Management, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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