Mitel WX puts communications and vertical apps in one client that changes with the worker's role

A nurse or plant technician spends the shift in Epic or a dispatch console, and when something goes wrong picks up the phone, according to the analyst who wrote up Mitel's pre-briefing for SiliconANGLE ^[20]. Mitel's own survey points the same way: 79% of workers reach for voice when rapid action is needed ^[12]. Together they make the best argument for treating voice as the one function the core client cannot do without.

In the analyst's account of conversations with IT leaders, workers default to WhatsApp when the approved tool does not fit the job, and IT loses control ^[21]. The analyst also said the major platforms were built for knowledge workers and pushed out to everyone else ^[19]. Eric Hanson, Mitel's executive vice president and chief marketing officer, put the vendor's version this way: "Many in the industry have attempted to build something that addresses the needs of everyone, but is optimized for no one," he said ^[10].

The evidence for the rest is thin. Frontline workers are twice as likely to use unapproved tools, the study found ^[15], but the account did not report the frontline sample size or the rate for other workers. The 57% tool-switching figure rests on about 1,140 respondents ^[11]. The analyst's own caveat was blunt: "It's vendor-funded, so treat it as directional" ^[16]. And the 80% figure is his estimate for the global workforce ^[17], while the survey covers four countries.

IT, not users, has to design and maintain each role. Martin Bitzinger, Mitel's executive vice president of product management, said IT owns role design: "It can't be left up to the user to do all of those things," he said ^[3]. Administrators manage templated roles in Mitel Central, including across the multiple domains common in health systems built through acquisition ^[4]. Each demo screen, such as the environmental services worker's view with work group log-in and task completion ^[6], is a template someone has to write and keep current. The analyst called the blank-sheet approach a longer path to a commercially available product that will likely pay off because the code is cleaner ^[22].

For a rollout, we'd sort each role on two questions. First, does the worker's job live in another system, such as an EHR or dispatch console, or in the communications client itself? Second, does a named person in IT own that role's template?

A role with an outside system and a named owner is where WX's design can be tested, because the client can put the system and the call queue on one screen, as the demo does for the hospital desk worker ^[5]. A role with an outside system and no owner is the case the analyst describes, where workers drift to WhatsApp ^[21]. A role that lives inside the client is the desk-bound case existing clients were built for ^[18].

We'd pilot in the first group. The tradeoff is that those roles are the slowest to define, and a pilot there will not show whether the 80% claim holds for the rest of the workforce.