A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco:

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In just a few weeks, the industry will gather at VoiceCon San Francisco, where Unified Communications will be a major theme. I’ve been spending considerable time in recent weeks reviewing the presentations, a process that has been both gratifying—haven’t had to do a lot of heavy editing—and instructive.

I found a great deal of specificity about UC products, services, implementation do’s and don’ts, vendor strategies and roadmaps. These presentations make clear that the industry has made considerable progress since VoiceCon in Orlando this past March.

One measure of that progress is how the discussion is shifting to UC ROI. While we’ll still be talking about what UC is—and what it isn’t—and analyzing UC’s elements—portals, interfaces, mobility, messaging, presence, etc.—the topics are framed by the need to quantify UC’s potential for impact on the enterprise. This, of course, is where the rubber hits the road, and while there’s been progress, the industry is still groping for a workable framework.

There are a growing number of stories about how UC has reduced time to market, how it has enabled major improvements in customer service and how it is could be used for “proactive” communications—e.g., advance warning/notification to people in a campus or even municipal environment. The good news is that these deployments show the potential for new uses for communications and/or ways to embed communications into familiar applications, and many of these examples of “low-hanging fruit” yield dollars-and-cents analyses that are powerfully simple.

The bad news is that there also are exhortations to try to justify UC investments using overly simplistic productivity analysis: X number of employees who are paid Y dollars per hour will save Z number of hours, so the total savings to the organization resemble a number that is equal to the number of miles from earth to the nearest star.

The limitations of these analyses are too numerous to mention. Of course, productivity is an important goal, and every CEO or CFO wants the members of the organization to focus their time on the right kind of activities—customer service, revenue production, etc. But no C-level exec worth his/her salt will believe that all the time freed up by a deployment of UC will translate into productive activity.

There also is much talk about tying UC to improvements in “business processes,” and that seems like a valid objective. However, since much of what occurs in those business processes lies outside IT’s scope, I’d like to suggest a slightly different approach: Couple UC as closely as possible to other fundamental changes occurring within IT’s business processes, and SOA—Service-Oriented Architecture—jumps immediately to mind.

Part of UC’s promise is that communications can be embedded directly into other applications, but that presupposes that there are application development and system integration techniques available to implement that change. Determining just how ready IT is to face this challenge is our rationale for convening a VoiceCon Summit during the San Francisco conference, where executives from Avaya, Cisco, Digium, IBM, Microsoft, Siemens and Skype will discuss Software-Based Architectures and Unified Communications. If the conversation goes the way I hope, VoiceCon San Francisco 2007 will be remembered as a watershed event.

What do you think? Drop me a line at fknight@cmp.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, Business Communications Review

Posted in Management, Market Trends, Equipment, Fred Knight, Unified Communications |

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