Most IT organizations are at war over a coordinated strategy and roadmap for unified communications (UC), leading to a fractured set of investments, UC user experiences, and limited user adoption in the enterprise. For the enterprise to derive maximum value from UC, the entire IT organization must unite under a common vision.
Most IT organizations are at war over a coordinated strategy and roadmap for unified communications (UC), leading to a fractured set of investments, UC user experiences, and limited user adoption in the enterprise. The problem is caused, to a certain extent, by the lack of maturity of true UC suites that deliver on their promises, resulting in a wide range of solutions with differing efficiencies. But as the industry moves toward more integrated UC suites from consolidated vendors, it will become increasingly important for infrastructure and operations executives to resolve UC's "civil war," in order to achieve better ROI and broader UC adoption.
Because infrastructure professionals in most large IT organizations are segregated by capabilities, there is often no one to pull together a comprehensive UC road map and strategy to be used across the department. This division creates a challenge for teams when trying to work with their enterprise architects to incorporate diverse views for UC technology purchases. It is this fractured approach that has made it difficult to integrate into one solid, unified strategic road map, causing infrastructure and operations teams to be stuck in the middle of this UC civil war.
Forrester sees six major players in this war, including:
* telecommunications departments
* data networking teams
* facilities managers
* collaboration professionals
* application developers
* end users
As each of these groups looks to align with UC vendors whose capabilities fit their particular IT service needs, they focus on choosing best-of-breed components, rather than a unified UC suite of capabilities.
But today, the supply side of the UC industry is moving to a suite of capabilities, with the growing option of communications-as-a-service (CaaS) accelerating this trend. However, due to the lack of coordination within IT departments, infrastructure teams risk providing lower quality service at a higher cost. There are six primary risks associated with a fractured UC road map strategy and deployment:
1. A fractured UC user experience. Each vendor in the UC space has a different approach to integrating with competing platforms, and as UC options become more diverse, user experience becomes more limited and complex as a result. Because UC capabilities are not mandatory, users may ignore technology that they feel is inaccessible or irrelevant to their needs.
2. Multiple, disparate management consoles. Failure to coordinate the UC road map will result in an increase of SIP session managers, each bringing its own associated management system, parameters to configure, and integration points into the enterprise architecture. This is especially inconvenient for operations managers who then must identify real-time voice and video traffic QoS issues managed by different platforms.
3. An oversupply and overlap of UC capabilities. Enterprises that do not create a cohesive UC strategy will end up purchasing separate tools for IM, voice, video, and conferencing systems with overlapping capabilities. This means they are paying multiple times for the same capabilities from various vendors. For example, using Cisco WebEx cloud conferencing and Miscrosoft Lync for IM, when both solutions provide web conferencing with multiple choices for users.
4. Too many cross-vendor integration points. The greater the number of UC vendors an enterprise uses, the more integration points that are necessary to allow them to work together. While enterprises cannot drastically change their suite approach overnight, they do need to reduce the number of integration pain points.
5. Increased security vulnerabilities. UC means moving real-time communications over to IP, using SIP as the standard to set up and tear down sessions between users. Because security solutions are sensitive to which UC platform they protect, having more systems running UC in the enterprise increases complexity and risk.
6. Reduced ability to engage key UC champions in the business. Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) teams that lack a sound strategy and roadmap are limiting their ability to find and engage "collaboration champions" who will help drive UC adoption across business units.
In order for the enterprise to derive maximum value from UC, the entire IT organization must unite under a common vision. This includes assigning a UC project team, building a UC systems management strategy, and conducting workforce segmentation. After developing a road map for a unified suite, look to build tailored use cases for the business that demonstrate ROI for UC deployment. These cases should identify workflows that could improve with good real-time, unified communication tools across the IT organization. Be sure to promote I&O project successes throughout the organization, building them up through internal marketing campaigns to highlight IT's collaboration.
Art Schoeller is Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving infrastructure and operations professionals. He will be speaking at Forrester's IT Forum, May 25-27 in Las Vegas.
