This is not surprising, given the challenges in today's economy. Cash is king.Even in situations where an enterprise has reserves and access to financing, preserving financial flexibility is a top priority. In general, the only IT projects that are being funded are those that replace failing infrastructure or, less often, a strategic initiative that shows provable, near-term return on investment.
As we have discussed before in this newsletter, UC has two broad categories of use cases. The first (UC-User Productivity, or "UC-U") helps individuals be more productive by making available an array of tools to help identify, find and connect to people or information from a desktop, mobile phone or other communication device. The second (UC-Business Process, or "UC-B") incorporates these tools into everyday processes and workflows to eliminate or reduce the communications bottlenecks that cause delays.
In the first case, the individual actively engages with the tools to complete a communication. In the second, the tools are embedded within the processes, and often are initiated by software that senses a need for information or contact; many suppliers are using the phrase "communication enabled business processes" to describe this type of application.
The individual use cases are easy to visualize and to understand. The problem is that the benefit statements for these applications quickly become centered around "personal productivity" and "ease-of-use." In today's environment, that doesn't produce the clear-cut ROI that line of business managers or CFOs care about.
CEBP applications, on the other hand, have clearly delivered dramatic impacts at many enterprises. The websites of Microsoft, Avaya, IBM, Siemens, Cisco and many others are brimming with UC case studies - many show excellent returns from communications integrated to optimize business processes.
In our consulting business, we have developed detailed frameworks showing clients how to identify, assess, prioritize and justify these transformative UC-enabled ways to change how communications supports business goals. Many vendors have created professional services arms to find and recommend ways that their solutions bring benefits. Cisco has had such a group for over a year. Others have added these services more recently - Avaya, Nortel, Aspect, Interactive Intelligence, Microsoft, Siemens, Verizon and others. Further, we are seeing the emergence of a new breed of system integration firms that are targeting the integration of UC functionality into business processes, including INX, Dimension Data, Accenture and Enabling Technologies.
But all this activity highlights a problem. Too often, prospective customers see UC as either:
* A convenient, nice-to-have feature with little demonstrable payback, or
* A potentially cost justifiable application ("Will it work that way in our environment?"), but one that requires changing processes, adding professional services and integrating systems
Neither of these choices is a slam-dunk in this economic climate. The first just isn't on anyone's priority list; the second looks like a great idea, but seems to entail a lot of work. All the justification looks great on paper, but, "Gee, what if we just waited for a year?"
Our industry does not have a problem with case studies, although more would be welcome. Rather, it needs two things:
1. More compelling ways to demonstrate how the benefits will work - not generically, but specifically for the each enterprise evaluating a UC opportunity. Sales training, more customer reference visits, trials, risk-sharing by SIs and VARs, even YouTube videos - but prove it!
2. Simpler ways to embed communications functionality into existing applications and processes. This is second, because while important, it's wasted without step 1.
Ultimately, of course, the economy won't "kill UC." The entire communications industry is inexorably migrating to a software-based, standards-grounded model. As that happens, UC functionality will just be there - part of the plumbing. And the capabilities to support both use cases will just naturally be available and become part of how we work every day.
The challenge is to have UC grow and thrive as the answer to the economic woes, rather than to be set aside as an unnecessary investment while companies continue to pour cash into their old, inefficient business processes. We'll see.
