It’s often said that tomorrow’s successful businesses will be those that can best deal with change. Therefore, the question for businesses today is how to accommodate change into the very fabric of their organisation to ensure they are one of tomorrow’s leaders. Today, successful businesses are extended enterprises uniting employees, suppliers, partners and customers on a global network. These businesses are inevitably highly complex structures where decision making is distributed and dynamic.
Building Business Success
Increasingly unified communications and collaboration (together known as UC&C) are being seen as supporting the routes to future success. Although relatively simple in concept, UC&C is however a hugely complex area and demands a radically different implementation approach compared with traditional IT and communications solutions.
Fundamentally, firms will derive competitive advantage by extending their reach to its fullest potential. They will become more flexible and adaptable entities, sharing knowledge, reacting faster and developing a more effective supply chain than their competitors. For global enterprises, maximising the potential of infrastructure and resources across geographical and time boundaries to achieve the twin goals of productivity and profitability is an increasingly critical management objective.
It’s no surprise to find that in general the people most responsible for revenue generation within organisations are also the most mobile: a crucial business development factor will be how well extended enterprises can deliver business critical information to all staff, in particular in real time to those valuable mobile employees.
“Increasingly unified communications and collaboration (together known as UC&C) are being seen as supporting the routes to future success.”
What is UC&C?
Over recent years, various methodologies, technologies and applications have emerged in order to support this aim. Business process reengineering, customer relationship management, employee relationship management and more have been adopted by increasing numbers of organisations around the world in a bid to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations, whether internal or customer-facing.
UC&C takes all of this to the next level: It is all about making real-time communications manageable and accessible across multiple devices within the extended enterprise. It is about seamlessly and intuitively integrating business communications solutions with operational goals, enabling employees to collaborate easily and naturally. However, importantly, UC&C is also about streamlining communications tools to optimise non-real-time communications – enabling employees to maximise productivity by effectively and efficiently sharing knowledge and expertise while maximising the potential of different time zones and geographies.
Leveraging the Power of IP Networks
The benefits of collaboration have already been widely recognised by businesses and, moreover, collaborative technologies have existed for a while in one form or another, deployed widely in applications such as audio or net conferencing, instant messaging or similar. UC&C takes this to another level because of the way in which it ties in with the emerging IP based communications networks that will form the bedrock of tomorrow’s extended enterprises.
In the past, firms had to employ separate networks to support their voice and data services. To support UC&C, firms need to have one converged IP network thus freeing themselves from the ongoing cost of deploying and maintaining different types of network architectures. This includes having to employ staff trained to deal with the individual network architectures: with UC&C this cost is removed.
Services such as telephony, conferencing tools, Instant Messaging (IM) and presence information, and email are by their nature interconnected as far as business professionals are concerned and once the applications share a common IP platform and protocol, such as SIP, all of these applications can be integrated and act in an orchestrated, productivity-enriching way. Integration then enables IM and presence functionality to be supported on commonly available IP-enabled devices such as PCs, PDAs, smart phones and other mobile devices, as opposed to relatively expensive niche products.
Realistic Benefits of UC&C
But is UC&C just one of the latest hot phrases? The answer to this question is an emphatic no. It’s actually about resolving one of the fundamental business issues – enabling a team to work together as effectively as possible. And in these days of global business operations, it’s about enabling globally dispersed teams to communicate as though they are in the same room, whether in real-time or across different time zones and geographies. In fact, enabling efficient non-real-time communications is probably a more important objective for most global operations, who will be loathe to be seen to look to any technology that looks to place an additional burden on already time-strapped employees by enforcing only real-time communications across multiple time zones.
Employing UC&C can mean that firms are much more agile, more adaptable, and therefore more ready to respond more positively to the inevitable changes that will occur in tomorrow’s business environment. The largest single value of such a way of working is to reduce what is known as ‘human latency’. This is defined as the differential between what individual pieces of technology could potentially holistically deliver and what they can deliver when used separately.
But equally as there are realistic benefits to be gained from UC&C, there are also some realistic challenges that firms may face in making it happen. The fundamental first step that needs to be taken is a transition to an IP-based infrastructure. For some this may be costly and time consuming in the short term. This move should be regarded as a long-term investment; the right highly available, robust and secure network is everything in UC&C. Of course, to make UC&C truly work, these collaborative capabilities need to be truly embedded into applications (often termed ‘Communications Enabled Business Processes’ (CEBP) today).
The other key thing firms need to do in order to make a smooth transition to UC&C is to have a clear understanding of who in their workforce will need what type of tools on what types of devices. Having this clarity before purchase can mean avoiding the trap of buying unnecessary, technology.