A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:

UCStrategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail.

While it seems obvious that UC’s success will depend on enterprise customers perceiving clear benefits, you might not know it because of some of the false steps that have accompanied UC’s introduction to date.

Too often, the discussion around UC functionality focuses on the ease-of-use features for individual users. The advantages these features provide are easily visible (and fun), but whether they support a purchase justification is the key question. As a CIO of a major manufacturing firm recently put it: “We can’t get these personal productivity savings stories past the finance committee.” We hear that sort of thing a lot.

The challenge of course, is to translate UC’s advantages into bottom-line impact. From what we’ve seen so far, the ROI benefits are increasingly from two broad areas:

• Cost Savings: Typically these come from efficiencies enabled by UC functionality, and perhaps the best example is conferencing. Many companies spend thousands of dollars a month on external conferencing services. UC-enabled conferencing capabilities can eliminate those costs. Moreover, presence-enabled status information makes creating instant conferences more attractive. That, in turn, means that conferencing can eliminate some travel time and expense. We’ve seen UC implementation plans justified solely based on conferencing savings.

There are many other potential areas for cost savings: Shifting calls from current infrastructures to peer-to-peer, especially for international contacts; avoiding needless call attempts by using presence; and, using IM rather than a call for a quick message. While conferencing is a frequent winner, demonstrable margin improvements from other ideas may work depending on your specific circumstances.

• Business Process Improvement: In general, applying UC capabilities to change how work gets done produces much more compelling ROI opportunities than traditional cost savings measures, in some cases, a ten-fold difference. UC’s long-term impact stems from its ability to transform business processes. This is also the way that individual productivity advantages can be aggregated into substantial corporate revenue and margin impact.

We’ve seen examples where days can be eliminated from the time normally required to complete a task-time savings that means more sales, lower carrying costs or better customer service. And, if whole tasks can be eliminated through better communications, the same work can be accomplished with fewer staff.

We’re seeing innovations using presence-enabled media selection to connect to a needed resource more rapidly than playing telephone tag. Or extending these connections to business partners through federation. Even applying contact center-like queuing and routing capabilities to experts throughout the enterprise. Moreover, these capabilities will be increasingly built into application software, so the task of finding the expert will be done by a workflow engine rather than a person.

Similar capabilities will facilitate communication of information in collaborative environments. And road warriors and remote workers have better access to people and information through client interfaces designed for mobile workers.

The industry is starting to accumulate information, case studies and implementation experience. Some of this will be reported at VoiceCon San Francisco, in the ROI session I’m conducting August 22. We’ve also just published a white paper on this subject (follow the banner on the vanguard.net home page.), and will have an ROI model available shortly.

Understanding ROI is the key to UC success. The good news is that there are many tools now becoming available.

What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@vanguard.net or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum. And see you soon at VoiceCon San Francisco!

Don Van Doren
Vanguard Communications, UCStrategies.com, and UniComm Consulting

Posted in Don Van Doren, Management, Unified Communications |

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