Barely a week goes by in the contact center industry where we don't get hit with another Three Letter Acronym (TLA). Most of the TLAs originate from over-stimulated marketing departments bent on making their mark in contact center history by coming up with a new acronym they hope will stick, or from some PR flak trying to demonstrate creativity in order to justify an overpriced monthly retainer. When these new TLAs show up in press releases and other literature, I generally don't pay too much attention.

So, when the acronym for Service-Oriented Architecture, SOA, began popping up in more documents that crossed my desk, electronically or otherwise, I admit my interest was fleeting at best. That was a mistake on my part. The more I've looked into SOA, the more interested in this particular TLA I've become. SOA has the potential to seriously transform the contact center and its perceived value to the enterprise in ways that many have only hoped for and never thought possible. If we as an industry can get our act together, SOA can help us shake things up.

Before delving further into what SOA can mean for the contact center in the future, let's review what SOA is today. Beyond being just another cool sounding acronym that you can drop at trade show cocktail parties to impress your colleagues and fool your friends, SOA is very much as the name might imply. Service-Oriented Architecture is an architectural retooling of software that allows for the exploitation of open standards that have been adopted by software companies. In other words, it lets stuff work together through the use of a middleware concept that presents modular applications as services via a standard user interface. Users can then custom-configure these applications based upon their unique needs via this standard interface rather than having to call on the usually expensive services of a systems integrator to rework the code.

At this point, you may be saying, "Been there, done that, got the CTI t-shirt," but it's important to remember that computer telephony integration was primarily an enabling concept that addressed communications processes. SOA is an enabling concept that addresses business processes. The companies that couldn't have cared less about CTI, like Oracle, SAP and many others, are already onboard with SOA.

Many functional areas of the enterprise are already embracing SOA as a means of integrating disparate applications that must work together, especially in a customer relationship management (CRM) environment. Beyond CRM, SOA is proving its value as a means of improving and smoothing business processes that had been previously isolated due to the technological barriers that existed between applications.

Now back to my original point regarding SOA and the contact center. I don't think I'd be telling tales out of school if I said that in many businesses today, the contact center is treated as the poor stepchild. Despite its role as the face of the company to the customer and the front line of defense in the battle for customer service, the contact center is often isolated from the rest of the enterprise. The contact center is underappreciated.

Dare I say it, but we ourselves may be to blame for some of this isolationist attitude. Maybe it's because "it's always been done that way" or because "they just don't understand what we do," but the contact center often operates as an island within the ocean of business functions. Contact center executives typically get their marching orders and execute them well, but when it comes to steering the strategic direction of the company, these same executives rarely take an active role. All that could change, though, if SOA is adopted in the contact center.

According to Yoel Goldenberg, Vice President of Contact Center and Enterprise with NICE Systems of Rutherford, NJ (www.nice.com), "Contact centers need to stop thinking in terms of standalone processes. The contact center should be part of the heart of the organization, leading rather than taking instructions. Adopting SOA and linking contact center processes with other business processes is an important first step in raising the status of the contact center within the enterprise."

To the best of my knowledge, NICE Systems is the first company in the contact center business to embrace the SOA concept and is putting some marketing muscle behind the recognition of SOA's importance to the contact center of the future. This job is going to be a little easier than the task faced by organizations, committees and companies challenged with promoting the importance of CTI some 15 years ago. The good news is that SOA is already established, accepted and being deployed in many other departments in the typical organization. Nobody needs to be convinced that SOA is the right thing to do. The big guys previously mentioned in this column have already taken care of that. The question remaining for the contact center is how quickly can it board the SOA Express?

"There's no doubt that SOA will be extremely important to the contact center in the future," says NICE's Goldenberg. "It will allow the customer care function to move out of the contact center and into the enterprise. In order to move from tactical to strategic organizational importance, linking the contact center with other business processes is critically important. The contact center must become a true enterprise solution and SOA is the way to get there."