6 Pitfalls to Avoid in UCC Planning

Creating a unified communications and collaboration roadmap is the most multi-faceted strategy project facing IT staffs. It directly affects how every employee works, communicates and collaborates both internally and externally. Meanwhile, the security and business case are both challenging and vital.

Most organizations do not devote enough time, internal resources, or money to the project. Why? It's a totally different bird than, say, building a network, enterprise security, or application development strategy. Unless they have built a successful UCC strategy and roadmap at a previous company, they simply do not have the experience.

Building a data center or network strategy, for example, doesn't require massive input from business unit leaders, or the understanding of business use cases or personas. They are straight technology strategies, with which IT historically has excelled. In contrast,

For this year's Enterprise Connect conference, I have put together a 10-step plan to help IT leaders build their UCC strategies and roadmaps. The plan is based on several years of building successful strategies for Fortune 500 companies and large universities.

I'll review a few basics first--defining a roadmap, identifying the technologies covered, and positioning IT to capture the attention of business leaders who may not be as responsive as they should to IT requests. Then I'll review the steps that should be part of every successful strategy development.

Following a structured strategy will help you avoid some important pitfalls, including the following:

1. Defining UCC too narrowly or too broadly. IT leaders often fail to include specific capabilities (i.e., document sharing, virtual whiteboards, mobile enablement, etc.) or ancillary, but related, areas (most notable, contact center). On the other hand, they sometimes include everything under the sun, with no limitations, and the project becomes too unwieldy.
2. Failure to identify goals and success--and regularly tracking whether you're on pace for both. Starting any project by imagining a successful outcome is a great exercise. The results should be on white boards, in group workspaces, and on every meeting agenda to make sure you stay focused.
3. Failure to define use cases. Why does this matter? You link use cases to new technology that can solve problems or improve processes. Use cases are applicable to specific business units, whose leaders can help fund the project.
4. Disagreement over what's available today. We typically establish a "heat map" when we do strategies. It seems like a straight-forward exercise of color coding all UCC apps and capabilities by the availability within an organization. If you work for a large organization, plan to spend at least three times longer on this than you expect. There is always disagreement over what's available, what's only available to certain business units, what's available but not being used, etc.
5. Lack of priorities. You can't boil the ocean in year one of your UCC project, so failure to set priorities of which apps come first is another key pitfall. Looking at the use cases and the heat map can give you a good idea of which apps to invest in, and which ones to simply better market because they're already available and solve a business problem.
6. Lack of sales and marketing. Yes, these areas aren't generally strengths of IT leaders, but they are oh-so-necessary. You need stakeholders, so pitching them on the value of the project is crucial. And once the roadmap is set, you must have a marketing and training strategy in place to ensure adoption.

These are just a few of the issues to consider when building a UCC strategy and roadmap. We'll review more, including operational impacts and establishing a governance council, at my Enterprise Connect session, "10 Steps to Build Your Collaboration Strategy and Roadmap." Hope to see you there!