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| Where Will Unified Communications Take You? |
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| By Scot Brian Bailey | |
| Sunday, 01 July 2007 | |
 Unified communications (UC) is a rapidly emerging technology that can enable the business to reduce costs, mitigate risks and generate revenue. Unified communications (UC) is a rapidly emerging technology that can enable the business to reduce costs, mitigate risks and generate revenue. Organizations are increasingly interacting with geographically distributed teams, partners and suppliers to execute their business processes. In response, the number of ways to communicate has grown rapidly in the past decades by pager, fax, e-mail, Web conferencing, video conferencing, mobile phones, short message service (SMS), instant messaging and, of course, conventional telephones and teleconferencing. Despite the many ways to communicate, we still find that collaboration is difficult. UC offers a significantly enhanced technology solution to solve the challenges of enterprise communications. UC’s value is its ability to help an organization improve its competitiveness in the private sector, or its ability to serve citizens more effectively and efficiently in the public sector. Collaboration-Intensive UC is a set of integrated communications technologies and capabilities that accelerate collaboration-intensive business processes. It enables collaboration between team members, partners and suppliers to occur seamlessly, virtually and instantly within one’s working context. The ability to streamline business processes results in cost savings through greater efficiency, and revenue growth by enabling incremental sales. This same technology will also mitigate risk by improving security, creating unified logging across all channels (for compliance) and creating a connectionless environment that is more resilient to component faults. UC is the innovative combination of several technologies and capabilities to fulfill a communication need, rather than a single product that can be purchased off the shelf. It combines converged network infrastructures, enterprise communications channels and “presence-enabled” business applications, which are presented to the user via a common interface. Converged network infrastructures are consolidated, IP-based, quality of service enabled, wired/wireless networks to transport voice, data and video communications. Communications channels are the multiple ways in which one can be contacted, and “presence” indicates which communication channels others have available to them to collaborate and prefer at a given point in time. These technological components are combined in an integrated and seamless fashion and presented to the end-user via one unified communications interface. The unified interface can be embedded in business applications, so communications can be launched from within any application in which the user is working. UC is the combination of these technology components that results in dramatic enhancements to collaboration that accelerate processes. UC solves the challenge of quickly contacting others via the right channel for the right purpose at a given point in time and establishing a common log of those communications across channels. Currently, people often have to try several channels to reach another party to establish communications. To contact someone, one usually tries calling the other person’s office phone. When unreachable via office phone, the next step is to call the other’s cell phone. From there, usually a voice mail or an e-mail is sent. This trial-and-error approach often creates significant lag time before people connect. As a result, business processes can be significantly delayed. UC solves this problem by enabling us to be contacted the way we want to be at any particular time. As each user device logs onto the network, it will show its understanding of the user’s state, and when combined with calendar and hierarchical user preference information, this creates the foundation of presence, which allows other appropriate users to understand how best to contact them. Even once the correct person is reached, it may be necessary to switch communication channels. Traditionally, this is done by manually exchanging contact information for the next communication channel. How many times have you ended an instant messaging session by asking for the best phone number of the other person? UC also allows collaborators to seamlessly switch from one channel to another, such as from a phone conference to a Web conference to view an electronic document. As business becomes more competitive, many organizations are finding they need access to information trapped inside employees more quickly. It is often not only a matter of contacting the appropriate person, but finding who the appropriate person is based on role, knowledge, location, time zone and busy/free status. This knowledge mining of human resources is becoming more important not only for contact centers, but also for virtual and geographically distributed organizations. Benefits of Unified Communications The fact that this technology has many features and sounds very cool is not enough; there has to be a clear and compelling business case with hard benefits. There have not been enough UC implementations yet for a generalized business case to be fully mature, but experience in the field shows that there are already these clear benefits: • Cost reduction – As telephony converges from a facility based infrastructure onto IT’s general-purpose data network, IT non-discretionary operating expense reductions can be seen – although the more important cost reductions are non-IT related. Its capabilities allow the business to benefit by more efficient use of its resources. • Improved and streamlined business processes – The right person can always be located wherever he or she is. Communication channels can also be switched as quickly as needed. Business processes can thus be routed more effectively, speeding up delivery and response times. Many events can trigger automatic communication with relevant personnel, either person-to-person or application-to-person. • Improved and streamlined supply chain – Business partners, suppliers and customers can form part of the expanded communications network, each one reached in the way they prefer at any given time. • Virtualization – Workers are no longer bound to the office or geographies, reducing facilities costs, enabling virtual teams and empowering distributed delivery offshore. • Revenue enablement – Real-time, seamless communications enhances the customer experience by providing potential customers real-time services from the right individuals to help drive sales. Furthermore, orders can be fulfilled more quickly. • Risk mitigation – In the event of disruption, the communications network will contact whoever is necessary as part of the business continuity strategy. For UC to be successful, an organization must do the following: • Define the end-state in quantifiable business terms. • Take a holistic view, but a phased approach. • Define and measure the quality of service. • Manage the change, not just the technology. • Treat communication technologies as enterprise applications. • Select long-term technology partners, not just the cheapest vendors. • Plan for a single integrated network. • Simplify standardized architectures. • Plan to reinvest cost savings from earlier phases to fund later phases. • Focus on the business and enabling critical business processes, not just technology-based productivity. The true power of UC is tapped when it is integrated into the standard business process and applications interact directly with end-users. This takes UC beyond productivity to truly enable the business to compete in ways that it could not compete before. |
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