By Kevin Schwartz, Executive Vice President of Global Professional Services, Aspect

I’ve been meeting with many companies to discuss how unified communications (UC) can impact their business processes. While it’s true that some companies are still trying to figure out exactly what UC means to them, many are actively planning their UC deployments. A growing number of companies have already launched their UC journey and are experiencing the capabilities and benefits of a UC implementation. In fact, according to industry analyst firm Forrester Research, there has been a 21 percent increase in UC pilots since 2007*.

One thing to consider is that UC should not be viewed as simply a technology implementation. Yes, implementing the foundational infrastructure involves a complex and integrated set of technology activities supported by rigorous planning and testing. However, the purpose behind the implementation is the real driver. The fact is, UC is a powerful enabler. It is important to view UC not as a single technology project, but as a journey that requires a clear business strategy and plan, and which targets distinct benefits at different points along the way. UC provides an opportunity to introduce productivity benefits, to transform business processes to improve overall results, and even create new and innovative ways of engaging the external marketplace. CIOs that approach UC from this perspective are far more likely to unlock the full value of UC for the enterprise.

In meeting with IT departments across various industries, I’ve heard many reoccurring questions about unified communications strategies, the required technology, and the path to a successful implementation. Below are some of the questions I am frequently asked on UC, and some insight into how companies can address these challenges.

Q: There are a lot of elements that make up a successful unified communications technology strategy like presence and unified messaging. What should organizations really be thinking about as they look to unlock the ROI from deploying these capabilities?

A: The most important thing is to not view UC as a project, but rather as a journey. Organizations shouldn’t necessarily be looking to achieve specific benefits from an individual component of unified communications, but rather look at it as a continuum of benefit opportunities that start with individual productivity capabilities around using presence, such as being able to click to talk to someone or not have to look up numbers, for example. Basically, these generally are individual productivity savings— a little bit hard to aggregate them on an enterprise basis.

The next step, workgroup communications and collaboration, is where you really unlock a lot of the savings benefits that most people would be familiar with around reducing travel and communication costs, and reducing expenditures on external conferencing by bringing those in-house. For example, workforce productivity can result in 20 to 40 percent travel cost reduction achieved by replacing internal meetings, in-person training and customer or partner visits with LiveMeeting. Plus, over the last year, companies have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in travelling and meeting expenses by utilizing conferencing solutions. In fact, Aspect’s own internal UC deployment is expected to save $75,000 per month on conference calling in the first year alone. Both local and long distance costs will drop significantly because of reduced circuits as a result of Aspect’s use of session initiation protocol (SIP) Trunking. Combined, this will result in additional savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars as we complete our deployment. Very often these benefits accrue very rapidly from the early stages of an implementation and can even help fund significant portions of the deployment.

But, where the real benefits start to be unlocked is when

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (2 votes)

Reply