The Pin Factory

While every situation is different there are times when Genesys takes the lead over Cisco and vice versa. Very generally, Genesys definitely wins the battle when integration of multiple hardware companies is the objective. n contrast, Cisco is a hardware company, and while Cisco can operate as a software umbrella over Avaya and Cisco platforms, Cisco excels when an organization has a large call center operation with a majority of hardware that is end of life. Additionally the Cisco Unified Communication and Unified Contact Center solutions are built upon the same basic building blocks, and as a result there are significant economies of scale created when the focus is initially IP Telephony with Cisco Unified Communication focused on the back-office and then transitions into a front-office, call center replacement with Unified Contact Center. The best advice is to begin with a comprehensive business requirement analysis with the objective of building a requirement plan and a high-level benefit analysis.

Offshoring may appear less attractive to businesses after considering a transformative strategy. Innovation and transformation diminish the advantage of lower cost offshore labor by yielding substantially more productive, transformed onshore processes that deliver the same or more output with less labor. However, the key to transformative strategy is broadening the focus of the analysis beyond a labor cost analysis, to a focus on revenues and net income.

There have been a lot of blog postings and articles written about AT&T’s iPhone ordering problems in the past week as if it spells some doom for the iPhone or AT&T. The issue with iPhone data congestion on AT&T’s 3G cell sites isn’t the end of the world for AT&T or NYC. The iPhone works [...]

There is a lot of buzz in anticipation of the expected Spring 2010 launch of the Apple Tablet. Most of the buzz is focused on the user experience, but there are now enough threads about a revamped iTunes, eBooks, and IPTV, as well as the built-in web-cam and a price under $1000 is where the [...]

Over 233 years ago Adam Smith wrote about transformation and high performing businesses. He noticed by studying Pin Factories that the successful businesses were those focused on transforming their operations. Smith wrote,
First, the improvement of the dexterity of the workmen, necessarily increases the quantity of the work he can perform; and the division of labour, [...]

The promise of Cisco’s UCC environment to transform front-office contact center operations is tremendous, but organizational leaders often find the decision a difficult one to undertake given the required investment and the complexity of implementation project. Upgrading from non-IP to IP-based call center technology irrespective of the vendor is a daunting investment, but the value [...]

Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now is an article that appeared in the Sunday, 6 December 2009 edition of the New York Times. The article written by Jenna Wortham focuses on the success that Apple has had with the Apple iPhone App Store. She writes,
As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications [...]

Robert Dvorak posted this question on the WSJ community blog,
How real is “Cloud Computing” and how are large companies (>$1B revenues) adopting it? Which IT companies are most threatened by Cloud?
Cloud Computing in this case is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) referring to infrastructure delivered in a utility model. The utility model arises from the [...]