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It's Time to Address 'UCCOps'

In 2014 Nemertes conducted a benchmark study of contact centers in the enterprise. One of the goals was to find out the characteristics of a successful contact center strategy, and along the way we discovered that results didn't match our hypotheses.

Our hypotheses assumed a positive correlation between deployment of advanced contact center capabilities like text chat, video, and even omni-channel integration, and success. What we found, in interviewing IT leaders responsible for supporting contact center infrastructure, was that the more likely a company was to have deployed more than voice interaction, the lesssuccessful the IT leaders rated their contact center strategies. This seems odd on its surface, but it points to a disconnect that we continue to see in subsequent benchmark research -- the goals of IT don't necessarily align with the goals of the lines of business (LOB) that rely on the services that IT provides.

In the contact center example, we found that IT leaders didn't want complexity, and that their primary metrics for measuring success related to factors like trouble tickets, time, and cost. But in interviews with contact center operations personnel, we found the exact opposite -- not only did we see the reverse correlation between success and capabilities, but also we discovered that as their primary metrics for success, operations personnel looked to customer satisfaction and their ability to support customer demands to interact through the Web and mobile devices.

Our latest benchmark finds that UC success ratings are falling. The percentage of respondents who self-rated their UC success as "very successful" or "successful" fell in 2015, while the percentage of those who rated their success as "unsuccessful" rose. IT leaders primarily are judging success based on usage, followed by user feedback, and then application performance. IT leaders tell us that they often find that employees aren't using the apps that they provision.

The disconnect seems to result from the lack of focus among many UC teams on what I'll call "UCCOps" (borrowing from the term "DevOps"). UC teams are still largely IT-centric, which means they want simplified environments, they want to minimize costs, and most of all, they want to minimize trouble tickets.

So if a UC team rolls out a new video conferencing solution, for example, and nobody uses it, IT may not put much effort into understanding "why" but will rather say, "I guess nobody needed it." What's missing is the UCCOps function that works hand in hand with business users to educate them on the capabilities they have, define business process improvements that available collaboration technologies can provide, and help with training and marketing tools to drive use.

This disconnect is only going to get worse if it's not addressed in the short term. For example, nearly a quarter of our benchmark participants said they are looking at emerging team chat applications like Unify Circuit, Slack, Cisco Spark, and dozens of others. But these apps aren't following the standard IT approach of "identify requirements, conduct an RFI/RFP, pilot, deploy." Rather, they are coming into the workplace via groups of users who decide that what IT is providing isn't sufficient for their needs, so they download the apps they need from Apple or Google app stores, or sign up for Web-based services.

A UCCOps function would be ahead of the curve, not only actively looking at new and emerging collaboration tools like team chat, visual collaboration platforms like Bluescape and Microsoft Surface Hub, but also social tools, idea management, and even question management platforms like Haydle. With a UCCOps function, IT wouldn't find out that LOBs have adopted unsupported applications, it would already have a solid understanding of user roles (or personas) and be actively working with users to align capabilities with need.

A few years ago there was much hype around the role of a chief collaboration officer, as discussed in articles by Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. But we've seen little evidence in our research that companies are creating this role, or adequately addressing the opportunities that having such a role, under the banner of UCCOps, would provide to improve companywide, customer, and partner collaboration by increasing usage of already-provisioned tools, incorporating new applications that can provide business benefit, and perhaps most importantly, aligning business need with provisioned capabilities. It's time to think about UCCOps in your organization as a critical component of achieving collaboration success.

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