The challenge posed by Unified Communications and top tips for implementation

From our own experience of deploying Unified Communications (UC), we understand the issues our customers wrestle with as they consider adoption.

From our own experience of deploying Unified Communications (UC), we understand the issues our customers wrestle with as they consider adoption. Dominant concerns are around cost, complexity of deployment and most of all, whether the promised productivity benefits will materialise.

But our UC deployment experience, not least in our own organisation, demonstrated that the implementation experience was, in fact, less problematic and the business benefits more positive than anticipated. There is no better time to consider UC adoption and much to learn from those who have gone before you.

• You are more ready to connect than you think. If you’re wondering whether UC is a good fit for your organisation, ask yourself a few questions. Do you need fresh ideas on how to meet targets for cost reduction or customer retention? Is your IP network working hard enough? Perhaps your teams must now do the same or more work with fewer people, so “enhanced productivity” is no longer a nice to have, but a critical business requirement. UC is the precision tool to tackle these challenges.
• Get the business vision right, the technology will follow. Don’t under-estimate the power of the big idea. Whatever your reason for doing UC – cost reduction, transforming customer satisfaction levels or improving staff effectiveness - get it clear in your head and keep it as your compass. This vision will help to keep your project within scope and facilitate clear decision-making during design, rollout and delivery.
• UC will make your existing investment work harder. Think about UC as an incremental step that, when placed on top of your existing network and telephony infrastructure, can transform its functionality and the end user experience. Implementation, too, can be incremental; introducing functionality on a phased basis can ease your organisation into the new way of working.
• Explain the benefits, not the terminology. For the end-user who’s unfamiliar with UC, listening to a colleague trying to explain the benefits can feel like death by buzzword: “click to call…presence…IM.” Drop the terminology and start telling users what their new working world will feel like: “You will know if someone is there before you call them; you won’t have to know or dial their number first” or “you can work on the same document at the same time in different locations” are business impacts people can grasp.
• Remote working will be a win-win. If your organisation fears that productivity will reduce if remote or home working were encouraged, think again. We have seen firsthand the productivity benefits of the connected enterprise - where everybody, regardless of where they are, can connect to company resources or colleagues as they need.  Home working is an important part of this. Demanding projects that require extra time and out of hours work become less onerous because remote-working tools let staff use their time on their own terms.
• Keep selling it internally after rollout. Help UC become embedded in your organisation. In our own UC rollout we created self-service websites, offered road shows for the senior management and lunchtime orientations to staff, created an internal blog for users frequently asked questions, and published instructional videos. The videos were one of our most effective techniques: an excellent way for users to see and grasp the new functionality.
• UC will probably exceed your expectations. One of our UC clients achieved so many benefits, he was astounded they’d all come from one deployment. For him, UC reduced a paperwork processing task from eight hours to three hours, dramatically reduced the need for travel, and delivered a dramatic reduction in call costs when staff calls to Asia moved to IP. Any organisation with decentralised teams will find UC a rich mine for cost savings and improved productivity.
At least once a week we chat with IT managers who are still in assessment mode about UC. We remind them of the 1990s, when the early users of e-mail and the Web were the few who seized a first mover advantage that put them ahead of the competition. UC offers a genuine opportunity to transform organisational effectiveness and control costs, as real-world implementations have demonstrated. A UC implementation can sometimes be complex, but qualified partners can remove much of the risk and ensure a successful outcome. 

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