My previous post didn't really address the substance of the piece that's currently featured to the right, by Marty Parker. Marty's in the middle of writing a series of articles that attempt to help specific verticals understand how they stand to benefit from Unified Communications. This series will expand on some ideas that Marty introduced in a BCR article from last year, "Top UC Applications Are Now Apparent."
My previous post didn't really address the substance of the piece that's currently featured to the right, by Marty Parker. Marty's in the middle of writing a series of articles that attempt to help specific verticals understand how they stand to benefit from Unified Communications. This series will expand on some ideas that Marty introduced in a BCR article from last year, "Top UC Applications Are Now Apparent."The current piece focuses on the Manufacturing vertical. I think Marty's Summary offers a good picture of the challenges in a UC world:
For those core competence areas that are retained in the business, continual optimization is critical and essential to success. For those elements that are outsourced, UC Apps can improve the coordination aspects with the value chain partners; even more to the point, it is worthwhile to request that the partners implement the appropriate UC Apps in their value chains to become even better partners and to pass on a fair share of the benefits to your enterprise as their customer.
In other words, the UC world is going to require more, not less, management sophistication. It reminds me of Charlie Giancarlo's comment during his VoiceCon Orlando 2007 keynote, which I recently watched again in the wake of Charlie's departure from Cisco. The goal of these new communications technologies, he said (I'm paraphrasing), is to make things simple for the end user--but don't worry, it'll still be complex for IT, so you'll still have a job.
