Statistics Has Its Moment

Back when I was a student at RPI, I took numerous courses as part of the requirements for my degrees in Management Engineering.  Most of them offered a good foundation in aspects of business which proved very useful in the years to follow.  But only one of them had a massive and lasting effect on…

Reflections on Robot Proof

I recently finished reading the book Robot Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, written by Dr. Joseph Aoun, the President of Northeastern University.  My interest had been sparked by a panel on which Dr. Aoun participated concerning the future of work and how it will be affected by developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI).…

Shifting Gears — From Product Management to Teaching

The year 2018 was a time of career changes for me. My last corporate assignment, as a Product Line Manager for the Converged Communications Division of Dialogic ended in early January.  The division was divested to another company, Sangoma, and all of the roughly eight product lines I managed were part of the deal, but…

Contact Centers Get Smarter

Contact centers have evolved consistently over the past two decades and always seem to be utilizing a mix of both old school voice technologies and newer solution elements.  My exposure to contact centers has been as a customer, product manager for related connectivity products and as a contributor to an important SIP-based IETF standard for…

Leveraging Industry Standards for Success – A Case Study

Telecom is an example of an industry that has created national and international standards for communications in ways that benefit companies large and small. As a consultant, I’ve frequently advised companies about specific standards and how they can be aligned with business strategies. Let’s consider an example. During the last 15 years, facsimile communications has…

What can the Internet of Things Market Learn from Telecom?

The Internet of Things is widely perceived as a hot market and has the usual hockey stick projections of massive growth laid out by market researchers such as Gartner and IHS Markit.  In this post, I’d like to consider one broad slice of the IoT market, the Industrial Internet of Things (aka IIoT), which applies…

More Business Disruption: Telecom’s Move to IP

In the late Nineties, the Telecom business was dominated by big companies who had built their phone network over many years using switching technology. But a massive storm was on the horizon as the same IP technology which helped revolutionize commerce on the world wide web started to be applied to phone-based voice communications. Early…

Business Disruption in Document Communications – What Happened?

In the late 1990s, the Internet and the World Wide Web created massive technical disruption for the worlds of document communications and messaging. Now, nearly twenty years later, business communications looks much different than it did going into the Millennium and once major businesses such as the marketing of enterprise fax machines are deep into…