Fulfilling the potential of Unified Communications & Collaboration

Details: James Barton; Category: Enterprise Ecosystems; 29 April 2013; 4826 views

Compared to just ten years ago, employees have access to – and familiarity with – far more sophisticated technology, and this can be harnessed to allow them to work in a way that suits them. As companies branch out across the world, it is ever more important to use the available technology to enhance productivity. However, employers have to respond to this demand if they are to harness its potential...

Unified Communications & Collaboration is a term that is becoming increasingly common as companies seek to capitalise on their employees’ existing knowledge of certain technologies, rather than forcing them to learn bespoke systems. Instant messaging and presence, video, web collaboration, audio conferencing and social/consumer applications can now all be considered part of UC&C.

However, as Neill Hart - European Converged Communications Director at Dimension Data - notes, assessing the opinions of end users is critical to driving adoption, as many people struggle with the concept from a personal perspective, and a successful return on investment with UC&C is dependent on user adoption. This is rarely the case with any other IT - people will find an excuse not to use technology if they are not comfortable with it, so UC&C has to be driven by what’s popular.

The acceleration in the recent past has been around social media, and as a result sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now being brought into the workspace as they are the media that workers are most comfortable with. This trend is perhaps the first time that the adopted technologies have been dictated by the end users rather than the IT department.

“This essentially represents a transfer of power”, says Hart. “Before PCs were particularly widespread the power was entirely with the IT organisation. Employees got what they were given and couldn’t really complain, whereas now they have more access to technology so they’re more familiar with what they like.”

The most widespread technologies, such as Skype, Twitter and Facebook, have the added benefit of being essentially free to use for consumers – from an employee standpoint, it would be a significant impediment if this familiar infrastructure wasn’t provided as standard, and since there is no real financial implication to the employer it makes sense to provide it.

“Until quite recently technology emerged first in the business – people had fax machines and email addresses at work before they had them at home. However, people now have tablets and Facebook accounts; the belief is that employees will begin to use the availability of technology as a criterion for employment”, continues Hart.

Employees now want to be able to use their devices wherever they are; if they can use an iPad on a train to get some work done rather than being bound to their office computer, this can increase productivity. It’s therefore no longer feasible for an IT department to point-blank refuse to integrate these devices to the company’s system.

The argument is that this power shift will in fact increase productivity if the focus is moved from the underlying technology to the work. Increasingly, organisations will be obliged to profile their users, in that they will categorise users based on the work they do and map this to the technology they provide.

Historically, if profiling has been present within a corporation it has essentially been hierarchical – the bosses get the best technology. However, productivity will increase by matching the role of worker to the technology that they use – it doesn’t make sense to provide the same toolset to everyone, regardless of their position.

“If anything, the hierarchical structure has been turned on its head by the advent of newer technologies”, says Hart. “The person who likely requires access to applications on a tablet via a wireless connection isn’t the chairman, it’s a field engineer. He needs to be able to go out, close off a call, take an electronic signature and move to his next call rather than coming back to the office and logging into a system.”

Without profiling, productivity may suffer; funnelling investment into a technology that is not strongly required may not add enough value to make it worthwhile. Profiling is not the fundamental base for driving adoption, but it is an accelerator; if a service is simply made available, some people will inevitably like it and use it. However, if users are consulted beforehand then firms can get an idea of the technologies they should be investing in.

It’s important to respond to customer feedback to arrive at the exact solution that they’re looking for, agrees Claude Sassoulas, MD of Europe at Tata Communications. However, he also cautions that tailored solutions are invariably more expensive, meaning that ultimately solutions need to be ‘repeatable’ and manageable at factory level. While personalisation and profiling customers has its advantages, there is also a significant benefit to providing vendor-agnostic solutions.

“As companies deploy resources, forging global partnerships and using factories across the world, they will need solutions that are uniform across the world”, explains Sassoulas. “There are constraints – access costs are often extremely high, which limits deployments, and quality of service is affected by the availability of infrastructure and data centres.”

He notes that one way of addressing this is through infrastructure partnerships – vendors can provide their offering through an operator’s network and in turn build out infrastructure specifically for them. He highlights that through such an arrangement, Tata Communications was able to construct a cable system in partnership with five Middle Eastern operators who invested in the landing.

This provided them with direct access to Tata’s global network as well as the vendor’s product set and processes for a seamless solution. Arrangements such as this have the advantage of allowing companies to expand globally with solutions that they are familiar with – they can unify their system, implementing solutions in Qatar that are identical to those that they are already using in London.

“The requirement for unified communications is truly global”, concludes Sassoulas. “It’s a matter of time until you can provide a seamless solution, but ultimately it’s down to cost and availability of infrastructure.”

Investment in UC&C has been proven to improve business processes, productivity and business agility, as well as providing more flexible working hours. However, all of these depend on users understanding the value that these services provide. Once companies establish how they – and their employees – will benefit from an implementation, UC&C will be well on its way to realising its potential as a global phenomenon.