It's been an exciting week here at VoiceCon, and I've been amazed by the parade of marvelous capabilities I've seen. Unfortunately, I do not see myself finding value from any of those capabilities anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm sorry if this frank assessment bruises the feelings of the dedicated but fundamentally misguided purveyors of these solutions (most of whom don't use these capabilities either), but might I suggest that it's time we got back to basics.
There is one simple rule that categorizes every successful product I can think of- you can define the product's benefit in one sentence. Can somebody please tell me the one-sentence benefit of Unified Communications? As we are clearly at the definition stage of this market, that could be a very focused benefit. If the idea blossoms, that may evolve into a more general benefit. If have trouble grasping this idea, think of the benefit of dial-up Internet access versus the benefit of broadband Internet access.
Maybe it's time we forget about integrated dashboards. These things intimidate the vast majority of our users and confound most of the rest. We can also back-burner video conferencing capabilities that none of our "C-level" presenters are capable of using (think about it: why does the CEO march out the "designated button-pusher" for the demonstration portion of his presentation?). Let's drop the frou-frou, and look at the one obvious benefit that anyone with three active brain cells can recognize.
It's mobility, stupid! (as candidate Bill Clinton would put it). With an IP-based telephone system, users can be reached at a single number (backed up by a single voice mailbox) regardless of where they are.
The ability to access critical people at critical times is the one-sentence benefit. Those people can also be connected to these great, cost-effective enterprise communications systems we've built, even when they're on another continent. We can do this by integrating cellular services, and we can do it even cheaper over Wi-Fi-- assuming we designed the Wi-Fi network correctly to begin with.
Communications enabled business processes (CEBP) is a separate matter. CEBP is the idea of using integrated communications systems and services as part of an overall business process. If you need a simple way of distinguishing "UC" from "CEBP", "UC" is a white-collar application, and "CEBP" is a blue-collar application. Correctly implemented, both have value to the organization, but they are barking up two separate value trees. Frankly, CEBP is something businesses should have been developing for the last 10 years, though most haven't gotten beyond the obvious target of call centers.
In short, if you want a white collar-focused benefit for IP-based telephony, quit grabbing at straws or ephemeral pie-in-the-sky benefits, and play the strong suit. You can take your office phone and all of its capabilities with you, and be able to have almost the same level of functionality (for little additional cost) when you're on the road. As we used to say in sales: "Sign here, press hard, you're making six copies".
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