Watson at Work – Cognitive Social Unified Communications together with Cisco

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IBM and Cisco have teamed up in the Collaboration Space with a global alliance delivering pre-integrated offerings.

The market leaders in Social Collaboration – IBM and in Unified Communication (UC) – Cisco joined forces to deliver an end to end pre-integrated solution – from the cloud. Target for the joined offering is to fuel better collaboration internally as well as externally in real time, with any preferred tool or media, while ensuring via people and knowledge centric collaboration, that the right content and experts are engaged. After all – nobody wants to reinvent the wheel –  we just need to utilise all knowledge assets available. For further information on the benefits of forming an enterprise based around knowledge sharing, click here.

A key theme for the offerings is: “Get the job done”, and here cognitive plays a key role.
As cognitive becomes more and more pervasive and cross all solutions, the IBM and Cisco alliance certainly also also targets cognitive capabilities and has a natural focus on moving collaboration solutions to utilize cognitive – where needed, and where possible.

To promote the joined offering of Cisco Spark and IBM Connections Cloud, Cisco and IBM have recently run a set of roadshow events in Europe, one of which was in the Nordics.  A highlight from the roadshow was the showcase of using cognitive chatbots and linking people-centric knowledge directly from the UC offering.

The following cognitive chatbot was showcased at the roadshows:

Cisco Spark is delivering agile ad hoc team real time collaboration, a wall to wall cloud UC offering out of the box. With Cisco Spark a virtual team can, with agility in a ad hoc way, be established for the task ahead. Now, one problem might be – who should be part of the team? Another question arising – what do we already know about the task, how can we kick start the task?

To solve this, we created a cognitive chatbot, run on IBM Cloud. First of all, the chat dialogue is driven by IBM Watson Conversation as a service from IBM Cloud, this allows us to combine natural language understanding and machine learning to drive the dialogue for the request. Secondly, as we wanted to find experts for the team, we utilised the IBM Connections Social Cloud open platform to search for person profiles via tags. Here tags are both what the organisation defines but also what people tag themselves and get tagged by other employees.

By linking the offerings together, we simply could ask the chatbot the following:

“Who is is the expert on the IBM and Cisco offering” – and as result have a probable answer from IBM Watson:

As Result:

“I have found these experts”: XX – “BTW, I’m 97.61% confident you were looking for this information.”

With the expert in hand, we could, with a consolidated view, access the experts shared files, blogs, ideas, knowledge, team, virtual teams etc – all to investigate further if it actually was the right expert to add to the team.

To investigate in real-time, we could simply click to message, call or meet the expert via the Cisco Spark offering to share screen e.g. Similar.   In the search for existing knowledge to kick start the task, we utilised the IBM Connections Social cloud people and knowledge centric solution, with a consolidated search cross all types of media.

As result – a single request utilising a cognitive chatbot gave us access to the right experts and knowledge – easy, intuitive and with agility.

Just map this showcase of Social Collaboration, Unified Communication and Cognitive to your daily situation and asses where Social, cognitive and UC can boost personal productivity

• your daily need for collaboration,
• your daily need for teaming with internal and external peers,
• your daily need for having access to the right expert, access to the right information

This is what the IBM and Cisco alliance is about “Get the job done” – for further information  click on the global IBM and Cisco alliance here.

If you have any question do not hesitate to get in contact with me at bholte@dk.ibm.com.