This blog comes to us from Bob Emmerson, our European contributing editor:
I've been writing about this subject for around five years, and when I saw a UC portal for the first time my reaction was "Wow." The business case for VoIP looked solid (I tend to see glasses as being half full), and once voice became a digital medium it could be brought into a portal and enable some amazing functionality. The business benefits were obvious: presence and managed availability could eliminate telephone tag, thereby boosting productivity. Now employees could have on-demand conferencing plus the ability to share documents, hence the second C: Collaboration. And the ability to communications-enable mainstream business processes was on the radar screen. So what went wrong?Looking back, it's clear that those early solutions were over-engineered: that's a core competence of engineers. For example, individuals could manage their availability in such granular detail that personal productivity would actually decline if all the functionality were embraced. And Microsoft's entry probably put a brake on the whole thing: everybody stopped and enterprises waited to see what was coming and of course they went on waiting and waiting.
Five years later there's an economic brake and it's clear that business issues, not technology enablers, will drive the adoption of UCC, which brings me back to the title.
BT has produced an interesting paper titled "Getting Started on Unified Communications and Collaboration". It starts with one of those observations that is glaringly obvious once you read it, but in my case it wasn't, maybe because my mindset was stuck in the past. UCC started out as a bottom-up technical development that encompasses a number of different technical solutions, including presence, enterprise-class instant messaging, unified messaging, voicemail and audio/video/data conferencing. The top-down approach positions UCC as a way of thinking about business processes and of aligning communications tools that provide new communications paths to existing business processes. That may sound like marketing hype, but it really represents a return to some very basic issues.
The starting point should be an analysis of the business needs and objectives and, as indicated in Figure 1, this process should also focus on organizational and cultural issues. Then and only then can you create a robust UCC strategy: in other words, forget the old bottom-up technology perspective.
Easier Said Than Done It's based on the possibility (probability in some cases) that the benefits of deploying a UCC solution might be overlooked for the reasons given in this graphic. For example, 22% of the respondents to a survey conducted by BT saw no need for UCC functionality! And 35% indicated that they saw other technologies as having a higher priority. This figure indicates that IT resources are stretched, which is to be expected in today's economic climate.
BT is looking to plug that resource gap and thereby enable organizations that are currently missing out for whatever reason to review UCC from a robust, business perspective, e.g. one that separates vendor and market hype from real-world business challenges.
Key UCC Components BT identifies six key components: (1) the communications infrastructure; (2) real-time communications; (3) unified messaging; (4) telephony integration; (5) security and management; and (6), line of business integration. The last is seen as "the nirvana for the business operations," but the industry has been talking about the integration of real-time communications with business processes for quite a few years. And at one time this development was hyped to the hilt under the "real-time enterprise" banner.
When viewed as a six-part holistic solution, the task appears to be somewhat daunting, hence the perception that it is too expensive (30%) and that other technologies have a higher priority (35%). However, these components encompass just about all mainstream communications technologies, and it is perfectly possible to start with high-value, bite-sized chunks and evolve the strategy. For example, implement secure, enterprise-wide instant messaging. Many employees use consumer-class IM and would be lost without the functionality (e.g. presence). They enable VoIP calls and file transfer so they are de facto UCC solutions. An IM management system such as Quest Policy Authority can be added to provide monitoring, management and control as well as compliance and security. It's almost a no brainer and it would go a long way towards reducing the big (48%) organizational/ cultural issue.
Conclusions UCC means different things to different people: too many different things. It's become a catch-all marketing term that's confused the market, and a confused market doesn't buy: it waits. The need to see UCC as a holistic solution is clear and it does need to be implemented as part of a top-down strategy; however, there is a dichotomy. Spend too long analyzing the specific communications needs of each department or business unit and you may miss out on the significant benefits that come from bite-sized, incremental solutions.
