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Can Unified Communications Increase Business |
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Can Unified Communications or UC as it is termed increase revenues or is it a ploy to get you to buy more technology. Take a look at some supporting data and decide for yourself... The Pew Research Center study - A Portrait of "Generation Next" shows that this generation (born 1981 to 1988) has a relationship with technology that is truly unique. While their use of personal computers is similar to that of Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) and only slightly higher than that of the Baby Boomer (born 1946 to 1964) generation, it is their deployment of real-time technologies such as  Instant Messaging and text messaging that sets them apart. In the 24-hour period before they were interviewed for the survey, 51% of Gen Nexters had sent or received a text message on a cell phone. Only 26% of Gen Xers, 10% of Boomers, and 4% of Seniors had done the same. Similarly, 29% of Nexters sent or received an instant message, compared with 22% of Xers, 12% of Boomers and 7% of Seniors.
These numbers point to an important distinction in the way Nexters use technology. Unlike the Boomer generation, the majority of which was introduced to e-mail and voice mail in the work environment, Nexters voraciously consume and integrate technology into their lives from education to social networking, entertainment, and personal enrichment.
Generation Next is driving technology into the corporate environment. This is a generation of born systems integrators who understand how to work with voice, data and video in a sophisticated manner. As they enter the workforce, they bring with them this knowledge and a resolute belief in the power of technology. Indeed, it is so ingrained in their behavior, they cannot comprehend a world without it. As Gartner analyst Jackie Fenn noted in her "Emerging Trends" presentation, some enterprises are already reporting that many prospects they recruit are turning down job offers due to corporate rules restricting instant-message communication.
An estimated 69.7 million Generation Nexters, accustomed to technology for personal use, are literally bringing technology into the office and demanding the ability to use it in their jobs.
A Workforce on the Move
In an effort to take the office on the road without sacrificing communication or access to critical information, the mobile workforce is turning to technology that may or may not be supported by the enterprise. A 2005 study by IDC estimates "878 million mobile workers toiling away on laptops, handhelds and cell phones" by 2009 and that many companies are not ready to manage, secure and support the handheld devices and applications they need.
And mobility is no longer the exclusive domain of the sales organization. Businesses across a broad spectrum of industries, of every type and size, leverage workforce mobility to provide services wherever their customers or clients happen to be. And, no longer constrained by geographic boundaries, mobility gives enterprises access to a wider talent pool—particularly the Generation Nexters accustomed to communication whenever, wherever, and however they choose.
With the proliferation of communications devices and the voracious technology appetites of the emerging generation and mobile office workers, it will take more than wireless telephony and Instant Messaging to support the increasingly complex needs of today’s enterprise. Rather, to support the myriad of handhelds and provide workers secure access to information, to customers and vendors and, most importantly, to each other requires a suite of services collectively known as UC.
Unified Communications is about uniting people, information, and context
UC relies on Voice over IP and pulls together Unified Messaging, voice and video Conferencing, and Presence technology to create secure anywhere, any time, any way communication throughout the enterprise—and beyond. Through UC, workers can collaborate in real time, access much-needed information, make decisions, and communicate seamlessly with customers and coworkers, whether they are on the road, at the office, or at their home.
Moreover, UC makes anytime, anywhere communication and collaboration possible with practically any brand or type of device and equipment. Particularly for the Generation Nexters who blur the distinction between company and personal technology, this represents a shift toward greater productivity and corporate support of the advanced technology tools they already use.
Consumerisation and the competitive environment
While pressure to adopt new communication technologies stems in large part from the workforce—particularly the mobile workforce and the new emerging generation of workers—corporations face pressure from another source: the competitive environment. In fact, the needs and desires of Generation Next provide a barometer for the demands organizations can expect to face from customers in the near future—demands that are driving companies to implement UC solutions, but perhaps not in the way that you think.
Through UC, employees are afforded the means and applications to respond to exceptions or, for that matter, any customer need that arises, and make customer-facing decisions based on real-time, relevant information—whether from a desk at the company’s operation center, on the Web, in the store, or by phone from a customer contact center. The human, then, is once again placed at the center of customer relations, with the power to distinguish and differentiate the company from the rest of the pack.
Corporate Best Practices
In decades past, the rate of new technology adoption was relatively slow. Even top companies were prone to "wait-and-see" before investing time, money and resources into technologies that could give them the competitive edge.
Today, companies are feeling the pressure to adopt UC, primarily due to the influx of consumer technology into the workplace and best-in-class companies are more likely to lead the adoption curve, leveraging technologies such as UC to support tech-savvy employees, address competitive pressure, and provide customers the conveniences and levels of service they demand.
The March 2007 Aberdeen Group report, "Improving Customer Satisfaction through Unified Communications" shows that organizations considered "providing their customers with more personalized service" a strategic concern and that best-in-class companies addressed that pressure through accelerated adoption of UC solutions. A later Aberdeen report shows the two greatest pressures companies face are responsiveness to customer needs and managing a decentralized workforce4. Again, best-in-class companies chose to address these pressures through the adoption of UC technologies.
UC Where it’s Needed
UC adoption rates and approaches vary by company, but best-in-class organizations tend to leverage the technology in those areas where it can be put to most productive and profitable use. For instance, 63% of best-in-class companies polled by Aberdeen arm their sales and marketing organizations with UC solutions. They are also more likely than all others to leverage technologies to mobilize their workforces.
Technologies Employed
According to Aberdeen, best-in-class companies use a broader range of UC applications than do their laggard and Industry Average counterparts. More than 80% are using an Instant Messaging ( IM) / presence system, and 81% have wireless e-mail.
The Aberdeen study also shows that, as a result of their investment and pragmatic approach to adoption, best-in-class companies are realizing the promise of UC. Best-in-class organizations report:
- A 55% increase in employee responsiveness to others (2.7x more than all other companies surveyed)
- 52% increase in an employee’s ability to gain knowledge/date from others (almost 3x the Industry Average)
- 60% increase in the flexibility of the workforce (over 3x all others)
- The competitiveness of their companies increased over 3 times that of all other organizations
- That UC solutions have increased the speed with which their products reach market
- And that they are working, on average, 3 hours less per week yet gross margins have increased 19%
UC Adoption Approaches
Rather than basing the decision to adopt UC on the network, or on a specific handheld device, providers like NEC with their UNIVERGE360 provides a unique approach through which to design a UC solution based on role-based needs—whether those roles are occupied by technology-adverse Baby Boomers or uber-techie Generation Next workers. It serves as a guide, configuring the applications, networks and mobile technologies for specific organizational roles.
Key Performance Indicators for Unified Communications Adoption
- Better workforce collaboration
- Streamlined workflow processes
- Fewer customer complaints
- Decreased time to address initial requests
- Improvements in customer care
Source: Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, Aberdeen, September 2007
• Network readiness. When companies add communications to their IP networks, the result is a massive increase of network traffic—an increase that is in addition to existing traffic from existing applications. One study found that 75% of companies estimate a quarter of their network traffic over the past three months was related to UC applications such as unified messaging and instant messaging, and that Internet, video, e-mail and Web Conferencing account for 78% of IT managers’ additional network traffic12. To avoid performance issues, it is critical, therefore, to assess the traffic needs of the organization now and in the future and ensure network readiness before implementation of any UC technologies.
• Leveraging existing investment in network resources. The degree to which a company can leverage its existing investment in network resources depends on the applications, the provider, and the equipment it chooses for UC solution. Some solutions are built to be used in their entirety, requiring a ‘rip-and-replace’ process that typically renders any existing network infrastructure obsolete. On the other end of the spectrum are solution providers, with systems and services designed to work seamlessly with other vendors’ equipment. NEC can also serve as an integrator to help companies maximize their return on technology investment.
Backwards and forward compatibility. Technology is constantly changing, and the equipment used to support these advances is changing, too. It makes sense, then, to implement UC solutions that integrate with the current network infrastructure and applications, whether from the same vendor or from other vendors, and with future versions and additions to the communications environment.
• Voice expertise. When voice, video and data converge into an IP-based UC solution, the result can be seamless communication—or a decline in the performance of all three. Voice packets behave differently than data packets, even when sent over the same data network. What’s more, our expectations for voice delivery are different from our expectations for data delivery; neither employees nor customers will be satisfied with anything less than a perfect connection. Simply put, voice over an IP network is difficult, and the challenge is exacerbated at each phase of the Unified Communication implementation (13).
• Organizational readiness. Organizational readiness spans a number of functions and challenges, from employee reticence and training to staff structure and workflow processes. A Nemertes study of 120 IT executives reveals that 79% of respondents either already use or are planning to use UC, but 60% report that their collaboration and communications staffs are separate and, therefore, not cooperating with each other, and that only 10% have their IT departments structured to handle collaboration effectively (14).
So, whats next...
Before you make a move, you've got to be sure that its the right direction and any new approach must be backed up with some hard and fast data.
According to 5i’s analysis; for every £1 spent on unified communications, £3 will generated in sales revenues!
Whilst many companies are coming to terms with the true meaning of Convergence i.e. joining technology and business process in order to generate income, a new methodology has evolved which demands simplicity as the key.
Over the next few years unified communications looks set to become a business standard, so it is worth bearing this in mind for future technology acquisitions as, the better integration between systems, the higher level of profits your business can achieve. But one crucial factor remains, if you can't determine the ROI or cannot create a business case for UC then it's a safe bet that you don't need it - not just yet anyway.
Resources
- Ignoring ‘Generation Techs’ at Your Own Peril, strategy+business
- ComputerWorld, November 8, 2005
- Harvard Business Review, May 2003
- Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, Aberdeen, September 2007
- Unified Communications Adoption Outpaces Expectations, Computerworld, August 21, 2007
- Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, Aberdeen, September 2007
- Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, Aberdeen, September 2007
- Zen and the Art of Rouge Employee Management, Yankee Group, July 2007
- Zen and the Art of Rouge Employee Management, Yankee Group, July 2007
- Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, Aberdeen, September 2007
- Study: Businesses Want Unified Communications But Staff Structure Leaves Them Unprepared, Networkworld, May 9, 2007
- VoIP, Unified Communications Study Reveals Challenges, ComputerWeekly, August 29, 2007
- Voice Over IP White Paper, NEC Unified Solutions, November 2007
- Study: Businesses Want Unified Communications But Staff Structure Leaves Them Unprepared, Networkworld, May 9, 2007
- Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, Aberdeen, September 2007
If your staff work in different locations and you are considering a more flexible solution to delivering communications to them please contact us 0800 970 9751 or email us at
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Unified Communications and Social Networking in the Enterprise |
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Written by Bob Emmerson
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Unified Communications and Social Networking: at first sight, it's an odd combination. Odd because of the functionality overlap and also because it's hard to see IT departments having anything to do with popular sites such as Facebook and MySpace. UC was designed for the enterprise environment, and social networking is a consumer development. One set of software operates via the intranet so it's secure, the other runs on the Internet so it isn't.
But the really significant difference is the uptake. UC is widely discussed and marketed, but deployment has been slow. Social networking, on the other hand, has been a runaway success. A Google search indicates that there are more than 53 million active users of Facebook, around 250,000 new users join every day and over 30% work as professionals, salespeople, executives, educators or are in technical careers. And of course there are many more sites, both international and national.
The baseline functionality of UC and social networking software is similar: IM and Presence, click to call, Webcam, file transfer and the ability to group friends and colleagues. UC can do more, e.g., it works with an address book, but if it hasn't been implemented in the workplace, then the younger end of the workforce is going to employ the alternative, whether IT like it or not. Recall that IT didn't welcome PCs, wireless access points or IM. These were developed for consumers and entered the enterprise via the back door. Moreover, the consumer market is increasingly driving technology innovation: it's much larger, so the rewards are much greater. Enterprises therefore have to accept the fact that the old top-down, centralized approach cannot compete with the new decentralized, Web-centric model.
Maybe you can put the 4-year delay down to the need for Mobile UC and/or Microsoft's wish to drop the need for third-party support and deliver the whole enchilada. And maybe IT departments are not keen on being locked into desktop communications as well as desktop computing. Your guess is as good as mine. The key point is the failure to deliver the requisite functionality to corporate desktops, which means that OCS runs the risk of being overtaken by events. Look at the time it's taken for UC to transition from hype to reality. I started writing about Microsoft's solution in 2002 when Greenwich, a real-time communications server, was introduced. Later on it became LCS. Client software known as Istanbul appeared in 2004 but that was just an enterprise-class IM product and third-party support was needed to enable the kind of UC solution shown in Figure 1
Figure 1. IPC software and SDKs from Movial enable UC functionality on PCs and mobile devices. Presence status is indicated by the colour bars (green, yellow and orange). Communications media includes chat, SMS, mms, voice and video.
ENTERPRISE 2.0
Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School, invented the term Enterprise 2.0, and his definition is "the use of emergent social software platforms within companies or between companies and their partners or customers." Enterprise 2.0 embraces popular network sites such as Facebook and MySpace as well as social and network modifications to corporate intranets and other software platforms. And in order to be effective, it also involves social and network changes within the enterprise.
Enterprise 2.0 sites allow information to be shared and knowledge to be managed, both in- and outside the organization. This is enabled by tools such as blogs and wikis, social networking and tagging. The benefits are immediate and significant, e.g., these and other tools allow individuals to join team-centric projects, to control the process while they collaborate, and to share information and create networks.
Project groups transcend departmental and even company borders, and employees can be selected on the basis of their qualifications and personal skills. Thus, there is no traditional hierarchy: the structure is flat. In addition, the use of social software allows new communities to emerge — communities that comprise people who find each other because they have the same job function or the same skill set. And in a very large enterprise, people who are working on a similar project may find each other and as a result stop what would have been an expensive waste of resources.
There is nothing new about this concept: it goes back to the 1990s, when vendors started developing knowledge and content management solutions that were enterprise-wide, expensive, rigid and required significant technical resources. The new Web tools are simpler and much easier to use, and what's easy to use gets used.
Individual employees, particularly the new, younger members, are driving this development. It's a bottom up approach — one that enables flexible ways of communicating and collaborating. Web 2.0 technologies allow individuals to create almost any application for which there is a need. These apps can be created quickly, in line with a changing and challenging market environment, and usage is intuitive, since a browser is the user interface. There is no need to wait on the IT department, no need to consume precious resources, but involving IT on the deployment side allows the applications to be kept inside the DMZ. Connectivity to the outside world can then be managed in order to retain the company's security and governance requirements.
MOBILE UC WITH A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE
The next logical step would be to combine social networking with Mobile UC. And that's exactly what is starting to happen. But before we explain, a review of what exactly Mobile UC is and isn't:
Mobile UC is facilitated by the fact that mobile network operators know the presence status of all the subscribers on their network and the new smartphones have open operating systems as well as powerful computing and display resources. These devices can therefore download or embed application software. However, Mobile UC should not be seen as a subset of desktop UC. Mobility in the average workforce is around 40% and the figure is rising year on year in line with improved broadband services such as HSPA, WiMAX and LTE.
The combination of powerful handheld devices and broadband services has allowed the industry to deliver a mobile way of working that replicates the office environment and delivers the wireless Internet. In turn this means that the mobile variant leverages the value of early investments in desktop UC.
So how is Mobile UC being combined with social networking? Here's one example. Movial is a Finnish software developer that markets white label, customized IP communications clients on virtually all mainstream platforms. The company was founded in 2001, so by mobile standards it's well established: moreover it's in Finland, which is where the whole mobility thing kicked off.
Movial has a comprehensive suite of IPC software as well as mobile applications and an SDK. In addition there is a presence engine that supports multiple presence protocols and unifies the presence needed for separate presence-enabled applications. In a nutshell, this enables the creation of solutions that pull everything together.
Social Communicator is a new addition to the company's portfolio — one that provides the UC functionality as shown in Figure 2, with an impressive list of social networking features. They include: Internet calling, media content, UM, plus combined Web and video feeds for content sharing and real-time communication on mobile handsets, PCs, IP set-top boxes, and Internet tablet devices.
The business case for this development is the way it allows telcos to unify their core business of communication with social communities and Internet content on any device. Optimus, a mobile network operator that is part of the Orange Group, has deployed the company's Communicator software. Their service includes a single phone number for both the mobile phone and the PC. This indicates that Movial can enable seamless wireline and wireless UC solutions that integrate with social networks and deliver a unified end user experience. 
Figure 2 shows one user uploading a YouTube video CLIP to a friend. In addition this application enables voice and video calls, UM as well as sharing of social media content (YouTube, RSS News Feeds, Flickr, etc). This means that all services are enabled over the same user interface.
CONCLUSIONS
The relatively slow uptake of OCS within enterprises has allowed alternative technologies to enter the workplace via the back door. Social networking is being driven by the needs of savvy individuals, and attempts to ban it because of security concerns will fail. Instead, IT should encourage the development of robust Enterprise 2.0 applications. The next step — bringing authorized third parties into the process — adds an extra dimension, and that is the kind of functionality that social networking enables.
Organizations are starting to work this way and positive results are seen in short order. If you involve trusted, key customers and suppliers in the development of new products at an early stage, then the result is likely to be a product that stands a much better chance of succeeding in the marketplace. Mobile UC has become a practical proposition — see "Mobile UC is So European". Movial's technology not only raises the bar by combining UC with Social Network functionality, it also allows telcos to offer customized solutions to enterprises and thereby generate new revenue streams and retain their corporate customers.
Bob Emmerson is a freelance journalist based in the Netherlands. |
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