That's shaping up as one of the key issues for us to discuss as we move toward VoiceCon San Francisco, and obviously one of the key issues for you to grapple with in your daily life. Even in the midst of a tough economy, is it time to start investing in UC? And if you do, how should you go about it--where do you start within the enterprise, what do you deploy, how do you justify what you do (or don't do)? In short, how do you build a business case for UC (and also, still, for IP-telephony)?
For VoiceCon San Francisco, Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research is putting together a new tutorial that will help you understand some of these issues, and Robin will be giving a sneak peek at some of these ideas this coming Friday (September 12), when she will be featured as the sole speaker at our next VoiceCon Webinar (go here to register).
With budgets tight, the expectation might be that wallets will be closing, legacy PBXs will be nursed through at least another year that they weren't expected to see, and UC investments will be deferred. At the same time, however, costs are rising in other areas of the business--most obviously, energy--in ways that demand, or at least might benefit from, decisive action to update communications technology.
The obvious example is collaboration, particularly with the new emphasis that we're seeing on video. You hear a lot of things said about telepresence, but few people quibble with the proposition that it's cheaper than sending people halfway around the world for meetings. Less obvious examples could include the potential for adding communications to any number of business process applications. Usually this is expressed in terms of gaining time to market or time to sale, but incorporating communications into various workflow and logistics applications could conceivably streamline business processes that are big consumers of energy, saving time and money.
But to get to the point where you can understand and document this next level of savings, IT has to work closely with business units, and we have some information to suggest that just the opposite is occurring. In a feature article I just posted, Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research reports on the results of a survey on enterprise UC attitudes that he just completed. Among other things, Brent found that UC buying decisions were being made tactically, with less involvement from the CXO level and more from IT. He also found that companies weren't necessarily doing a lot of homework--in the form of needs analyses, ROIs and RFPs--before purchasing UC gear. This suggests that, far from knowing how communications can improve business processes, some enterprises are investing in UC without really even knowing why they're doing it at all.
It's hard to believe that companies can really buy UC without a clear strategic idea of how it will be used, or specific plans for how to cost-justify it. As companies and departments start locking in their 2009 budgets, technology that looks interesting and nice to have isn't likely to make the cut, absent a convincing plan for how it will help the business.
