Benefits seem clear and the technology isn't all that hard to adopt, but some people just take longer to get on board—and the business case can be tough to quantify.
Art Schoeller and Onica King of Forrester Research have a new report out about Unified Communications end user adoption, and while they paint an overall picture of a maturing market and reasonable acceptance of UC both in technology organizations and end user populations, they do highlight a few noteworthy concerns.
Forrester surveyed end users and found that only 7% were "not interested" in UC at all—which is good news--though another 28% said they were "interested, but [had] no plans" to deploy. So you've got better than one-third of the user base saying that UC may be interesting (or may not be), but it's not compelling enough to drive them to plan to use it.
In a separate survey, Forrester asked end users, "How much do you agree with the following statement about unified communications: 'We aren't getting all of the benefits we expected'?" This year, 23% gave that a 4 or 5 on a scale of 5, i.e., they agreed or strongly agreed; that's the exact same percentage as two years ago, and last year the figure actually spiked up to 28%. "For a maturing technology, the trend of this response should have been downward, but instead it remains frustratingly flat," Art and Onica write in the report.
Art was kind enough to write a guest post for No Jitter, offering suggestions for ways that IT managers (or Infrastructure & Operations, I&O, in Forrester parlance) can foster end user adoption of deployed UC technologies. What's interesting to me is that they ascribe at least some of the lack of adoption to tendencies that we might be inclined to minimize or think are no longer a factor:
"One major concern voiced by end users is that real-time presence information will pose interruptions to their everyday work (much like e-mail was viewed in its early days.) Others may cling to stubborn 'old communication methods are enough' mindsets and revert to existing methods of communication when they encounter UC tools that they feel are too complex. Video conferencing in particular is often met with hesitation from end users. While many may object because videoconferencing puts them on the spot when it comes to their appearance, there are also those who simply feel uncomfortable on camera."
I've also heard several people say that, when you're collaborating ad hoc with people you know well, video really isn't necessary, and can be distracting if the quality is poor.
In his No Jitter post, Art suggests that tech organizations not assume that UC functionality is widely understood before it goes into the enterprise: "I&O professionals too often make the mistake of assuming that users are well-versed in UC. Even with all of the recent trends such as instant messaging and video as a free service, users aren't necessarily comfortable with the exact tools that they will encounter."
All in all, I think the Forrester report and Art Schoeller's No Jitter post provide us with a healthy reminder that in many ways UC is this generation's answer to voice mail in its time: The benefits seem clear and the technology isn't all that hard to adopt, but some people just take longer to get on board with it—and the business case can be tough to quantify.
