INX Blog

Goal for UC: Business Collaboration or Communication?

The measurement of returns is a key concern with any IT investment. The most noteworthy ROI publicly documented as resulting from unified communications (UC) is a reduction in travel created by video conferencing and telepresence. In fact, that has been a driving force for much of the adoption of UC solutions to date. In order for CIOs to move from considering an increase of their investments in UC to taking action, they need to see additional tangible avenues for measuring ROI.

Nailing the business case is often the issue that keeps companies from moving forward with UC.  Perhaps a shift in perspective will help. What if the goal for UC is really a matter of increasing collaboration with the enablement of rich communications as the means to support that outcome?

Unarguably, in a knowledge-based business environment, the need to improve worker productivity is growing. Whether due to less budget for new hires or the requirements to meet strategic company objectives, the need to do more with less is a refrain that continues into 2010. 

As a result, companies need to address hindrances to productivity such as:

• A lack of access to information and colleagues.


• Delays to decisions based on the ability to locate and connect with subject-matter experts.


• Limited participation by geographically dispersed or traveling team members.

Collaboration capabilities can lessen or even eliminate those limitations. This often means the difference between hitting milestones and managing customer needs or dealing with delays and pushing deadlines that result in diminished customer satisfaction.

When companies enable collaboration for project teams, they are applying UC to an activity that can be measured; for instance, start and end dates, milestone goals, and deliverable requirements. If CIOs measure the ability of their company's teams to complete tasks and projects faster while delivering satisfying customer results—instead of trying to measure returns based on the technology alone—they can prove the ROI of their investment in UC by turning their focus to collaboration as the goal.

UC Helps Business Harness Information Silos

One of the biggest impacts of collaboration on the enterprise is the increased ability to find and use the right information at the right time. But, recent research findings differ. It would appear that there's either way too much information to make sense of, or that the ability to find what we need is severely limited—depending upon who you ask.

Collaboration powered by unified communications can help streamline the information flow. It's all about harnessing the silos you have now while working to make the boundaries to the information contained within them more fluid. Eliminating silos has been a battle cry for increasing informational access. But, perhaps that's too big an effort for many enterprises to tackle during this period of do more with less.

Consider simplifying your efforts.

Last month's post, Workspaces Put an End to Mass Project Emails, discussed how to end the chaos of overflowing email which also serves to create silos of information for project teams. Increasing productivity—even amidst silos of information—becomes possible when the information critical to completing a project can be compiled within a workspace and made accessible to all project members, regardless of which silo or system sourced it.

One way to accomplish this is by enabling access to subject-matter experts via unified messaging, presence and video conferencing. This access allows your workers increased ability to actually find and gain access to the information they need. Once discovered the information can be added to the workspace for the entire team to use to do their jobs better...and faster.

The truth is that most companies produce silos of information created around areas of expertise. That's the nature of departmental work. You have your contact center silo, your solution area silos, your sales silo and marketing silo, to mention a few. Each of those areas is a concentrated niche of expertise that includes the subject matter experts who can facilitate access and establish context for how the information can best be applied to the project at hand.

The inherent problem with a "silo" is that it's limited by how data is accessed and used. Data usually has only one way in and one way out. Based on the demand for access to information that meets a workers' needs at a specific point in time, the better choice may be to improve collaboration across silo boundaries.

Perhaps harnessing your existing information silos via unified communications and collaboration is a more compelling and economically feasible approach than attempting to merge all of your information islands together while struggling to maintain the integrity of the data simultaneously.

What do you think?

Collaboration powered by unified communications can help streamline the information flow. It's all about harnessing the silos you have now while working to make the boundaries to the information contained within them more fluid. Eliminating silos has been a battle cry for increasing informational access. But, perhaps that's too big an effort for many enterprises to tackle during this period of do more with less.

Consider simplifying your efforts.

Last month's post, Workspaces Put an End to Mass Project Emails, discussed how to end the chaos of overflowing email which also serves to create silos of information for project teams. Increasing productivity—even amidst silos of information—becomes possible when the information critical to completing a project can be compiled within a workspace and made accessible to all project members, regardless of which silo or system sourced it.

One way to accomplish this is by enabling access to subject-matter experts via unified messaging, presence and video conferencing. This access allows your workers increased ability to actually find and gain access to the information they need. Once discovered the information can be added to the workspace for the entire team to use to do their jobs better...and faster.

The truth is that most companies produce silos of information created around areas of expertise. That's the nature of departmental work. You have your contact center silo, your solution area silos, your sales silo and marketing silo, to mention a few. Each of those areas is a concentrated niche of expertise that includes the subject matter experts who can facilitate access and establish context for how the information can best be applied to the project at hand.

The inherent problem with a "silo" is that it's limited by how data is accessed and used. Data usually has only one way in and one way out. Based on the demand for access to information that meets a workers' needs at a specific point in time, the better choice may be to improve collaboration across silo boundaries.

Perhaps harnessing your existing information silos via unified communications and collaboration is a more compelling and economically feasible approach than attempting to merge all of your information islands together while struggling to maintain the integrity of the data simultaneously.

What do you think?

Unified Communications is Like Social Media for Business

With the proliferation of social media participation, users are embracing personal tools that enable them to connect with others, share their locations and what they're doing—even taking conversations that develop during social networking to other applications to better facilitate them.

Here are a couple of comparative examples that provide a few ideas about how social media might be considered a test run for unified communications:

Twitter was founded on the premise of "What are you doing?" - which has now morphed into "What's Happening?" as a way to minimize the literal interpretation that led people to share a lot of noise about what they ate for breakfast, and other mundane clutter. People still post their whereabouts to let people know where they are. Restaurants, airports, meetings, etc. Think of this as a form of presence represented by unified communications. Direct Tweeting between individuals is an external form of instant messaging.

LinkedIn groups enable people with similar interests to ask and answer questions. The threads are preserved for use after the fact. This is similar (although broader in scope) to how a project team might use a WebEx Connect workspace to collaborate about the deliverables for a project. However, LinkedIn also simulates presence with status updates and trip notifications.

YouTube allows anyone to make a video and post it online. With a Flip video camera, anyone can share rich media that's instantly more personal than a text message. Rich media is transitioning from a novelty to an expectation from users. Unified Communications that enables the sharing of videos and video conferencing on demand delivers on those expectations.

However, with social media comes concerns from the business about governance. That's one of two findings that Neil Hair of the Rochester Institute of Technology discusses that resulted from a Cisco-sponsored study into the effects of social media on the enterprise.

The point is that collaborative tools are being brought inside the enterprise whether or not IT is the one providing them. The good thing is that people are adopting the tools and showing a higher interest in communicating, connecting and collaborating with peers and colleagues, business partners, customers and suppliers. This could make user adoption of unified communication tools a much easier process than previously thought—especially with an intuitive interface that pulls all these modes of communication together.

For additional insight about how people are influencing the adoption of unified communications via their use of Skype, this post provides further proof that your work force is embracing the tools whether or not IT is providing them.

These are all great indications that IT can proactively respond to the needs indicated by their end users' behavior and harness that enthusiasm to implement UC to more easily connect colleagues, customers and partners to improve collaboration in an organized and integrated way designed to produce improved business results.

Eliminating Communication Latency Boosts Business

Considering that communications are likely the lifeblood of your business, eliminating communication latency should be a top priority. In order to keep pace with the demands of our business environments, we've got to improve the way we work together as well as the way we serve our customers' increasing demands.

We've all used email and the phone extensively in our professional lives. Both can be used in a one-to-one or one-to-many setting. However, one limitation with only phone or email is that phone excludes data and email excludes voice.

When using only phone or email, response times are unreliable. If people are not available immediately, this can result in messages getting lost in overflowing inboxes or voice mail that can remain unanswered. Unified communications simplifies the growing complexity of communications by taking the guesswork out of the process.

Presence not only aids workers in discovering who's available when needed, but the best way to reach them. This reduces delays to decision making, improves your ability to hit project milestones on time and helps your company resolve more customer issues during the first call—to name but a few benefits that can boost your business results.

Speed and instant gratification seem to be the norm for communications today. This expectation has been aided by social media and Web 2.0 tools that enable seemingly instantaneous interactions. Your customers expect faster response times and so does your workforce.

Unified Communications is focused on reducing response times for work completion by enabling people to choose the most efficient and effective means of interaction for the task at hand. That means connecting the right people with the right information at the right time, regardless of location.

If you're looking for solid reasons to justify investing in advanced communication technology, here are a few issues that unified communications can help to correct:

• Number of customer issues requiring more than one call for resolution.
• Project delays based on the unavailability of subject matter experts.
• Amount of time executives are unavailable due to travel.
• Escalating product development costs.
• Lengthening sales cycles due to scheduling conflicts for sales meetings.

Enabling better connectivity between voice, data and applications impacts all of these at varying degrees. And the impacts are powerful enough to produce quite a return on investment.

Workspaces Put an End to Mass Project Emails

Nearly all of us work on teams or within project groups. The norm for communications within teams and groups are those mass emails. You know, the ones where everyone copies everyone else about everything, even if everyone doesn't need to know...just in case they might.

Overflowing inboxes are productivity inhibitors. If you've ever spent a day living in your inbox because messages just keep pouring in, you've surely thought there must be a better way.

There is. It's a collaborative workspace.

A collaborative workspace is a secure online environment for virtual team interface. You can also leverage your existing investments in unified communications by adding telephony capabilities to the workspace to easily manage voice communications through your computer when you're away from the office.

The beauty of a workspace is that it enables you to easily and securely include team members outside your company — suppliers, partners and customers, for example. Project team facilitation becomes easier when all members are working together with the same information at hand.

Consider a few benefits from putting an end to mass project emails:

• With the discussion forum questions and answers can be posted within the space, keeping all threads of information on record for simplified teamwork and collaboration. Imagine not having to search through dozens of emails to find an answer to a question asked three weeks ago.


• Documents can be checked out and worked on by team members, eliminating the question about which version is the latest and greatest — streamlining project management and creating a legacy record of the project details and deliverables.


• Know instantly who's available when you need them. Instant message for brief exchanges, escalate IM to a phone call or invite available team members to jump on a video conference to gain a fast consensus for a decision that keeps the project moving forward to meet milestone dates.


• Desktop Sharing enables team members to share work in progress with the team in real time, facilitating discussions that can help to modify the work as a group and eliminate the delays caused by forwarding documents via email for individual review and response.

In case you're still not convinced that workspaces are key drivers for increasing productivity and reducing the frustrations caused by fragmented collaboration, take a look at how a sales team reduced email dependence by 95% and what that shift produced for them.

Even Basic Collaboration Pays Off

Frost and Sullivan conducted a study together with Cisco and Verizon to discern the returns on collaboration seen by companies who have deployed varying degrees of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C). They found that even Basic Collaborators identify an almost 2.8 return on their UC&C investment. The more progressive that collaboration deployments become, the higher the return with those at the highest levels seeing a return of six times on their investment.

Here's a snapshot of the differing levels of collaboration the study found:

Source: Frost and Sullivan

Unified communications is often touted as delivering ROI through reduced travel expenses. But, the returns on collaboration aren’t as simple as traditional ROI measurements tied to dollars and cents. Research is finding that the benefits show up in unexpected ways related to improvements tied to functional areas.

The research into returns by functional area found that interactions involving higher numbers of people produced the highest levels of returns, for example:

• HR – 2.4
• R&D – 5.1
• Sales – 5.2
• Marketing – 4.4

The point to consider is that every level of UC&C deployments are found to deliver ROI. So, start now and roll out additional tools incrementally to generate those progressive levels of improvements that payoff with quantifiable performance improvements.

Download the Frost and Sullivan Report and see how Biesse America is realizing a $15,000 to $18,000 monthly ROI from their UC&C deployment over on Search VoIP

Collaboration Helps Businesses Leverage Hidden Knowledge

Our companies have to keep pace with our market environments. We can no longer compete effectively if we're unable to locate and use our knowledge assets in innovative ways. Work is not a solitary endeavor. Ideas shared converge and generate new concepts not possible without harnessing a variety of perspectives.

Business success is based upon how information is shared and used. By providing our employees with the right information, at the right time, to make better decisions more efficiently, more opportunities for success exist. The crux of the matter is that this information often resides with your staff, partners and even your customers. It's not always located on your servers or within your systems.

This is why unified communications and collaboration are enabling the "new normal" for doing business. By our very nature, we're social animals. Just look at how fast social networking and Web 2.0 have become part of our daily experiences. The ability to "meet" and exchange ideas with people we'd never have the opportunity to otherwise communicate with has changed our perceptions and increased our desire to interact whenever we decide to participate.

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines because the expertise we need is across town or in a different time zone. People are the secret sauce for business execution. This said, processes and applications are the supporting cast that helps people bring our businesses to life in service of our markets.

Collaboration is people working together to achieve a common goal. Unified communications is the technology that enables that goal achievement - anytime, anywhere - which is the "new normal" businesses must achieve to find success.

A recent study conducted by Cisco found that 75% of 800 people asked say that work practices today are more collaborative than they were two years ago. The study also found that, "email and phone conferencing remain the most frequently used tools for collaboration. In addition, more than 75 percent use electronic calendaring and web conferencing, 68 percent use video conferencing, and about 40 percent use wikis and blogs."

Get a copy of the report here and start considering how you can improve the way you enable people to work together to drive your company's success.

Our companies have to keep pace with our market environments. We can no longer compete effectively if we're unable to locate and use our knowledge assets in innovative ways. Work is not a solitary endeavor. Ideas shared converge and generate new concepts not possible without harnessing a variety of perspectives.

Business success is based upon how information is shared and used. By providing our employees with the right information, at the right time, to make better decisions more efficiently, more opportunities for success exist. The crux of the matter is that this information often resides with your staff, partners and even your customers. It's not always located on your servers or within your systems.

This is why unified communications and collaboration are enabling the "new normal" for doing business. By our very nature, we're social animals. Just look at how fast social networking and Web 2.0 have become part of our daily experiences. The ability to "meet" and exchange ideas with people we'd never have the opportunity to otherwise communicate with has changed our perceptions and increased our desire to interact whenever we decide to participate.

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines because the expertise we need is across town or in a different time zone. People are the secret sauce for business execution. This said, processes and applications are the supporting cast that helps people bring our businesses to life in service of our markets.

Collaboration is people working together to achieve a common goal. Unified communications is the technology that enables that goal achievement - anytime, anywhere - which is the "new normal" businesses must achieve to find success.

A recent study conducted by Cisco found that 75% of 800 people asked say that work practices today are more collaborative than they were two years ago. The study also found that, "email and phone conferencing remain the most frequently used tools for collaboration. In addition, more than 75 percent use electronic calendaring and web conferencing, 68 percent use video conferencing, and about 40 percent use wikis and blogs."

Get a copy of the report here and start considering how you can improve the way you enable people to work together to drive your company's success.

What's Collaboration Done for You Lately?

With the economy challenging proof that every technology investment will produce identifiable business value, it's nice to know that collaboration and conferencing are looking at a 25% compound growth rate over the next five years (according to analyst Blair Pleasant).

This excerpt from her post brings the value point home:

"Of course, for collaboration technologies to succeed, they have to be used in ways that make good business sense. In the past, many of the companies that implemented video technology, for example, were unhappy with the results. Some thought that it would be important to simply be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them. “Talking heads” as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.

With the economy challenging proof that every technology investment will produce identifiable business value, it's nice to know that collaboration and conferencing are looking at a 25% compound growth rate over the next five years (according to analyst Blair Pleasant).

This excerpt from her post brings the value point home:

"Of course, for collaboration technologies to succeed, they have to be used in ways that make good business sense. In the past, many of the companies that implemented video technology, for example, were unhappy with the results. Some thought that it would be important to simply be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them. “Talking heads” as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.

See Unified Communications in Action

This video shows how collaboration improves customer service relationships. It's a fun take on what the future might look like on a personal level combined with the way business can get done better and more efficiently behind the scenes.

Isn't it interesting that by simplifying how teams and employees connect across your company you can transform how your customers experience your complex products? Although I'm still not sure I'm ready to hear Scrappy talk to me in English...

Unified Communications Impacts Business Results

CIO Magizine conducted an exclusive survey of 413 CIO.com visitors involved in technology purchases at their organizations in July 2009.

The survey asked respondents to answer a variety of questions about the use of unified communcations, including determining factors for purchase, benefits received and future plans around use of the advanced technology.

The survey results for the 32% of respondents currently using UC include:

Benefits considered to have the greatest impact include:

• Faster productivity 64%
• Faster response time and delivery of information 50%
• Reduced travel expenses 40%
• Improved customer service 31.6%

It's interesting to note that the result we hear about the most often, reduced travel expense, was in 3rd place. And the argument for Green IT was only considered a great benefit by 8.3%.

Regarding functionality currently being implemented:

• 26% are installing VOIP
• 24.5% IP Telephony
• 18.2% video conferencing
• 17.4% unified messaging

It's nice to see that more companies are leveraging their IP networks with purpose-built solutions that increase productivity through collaboration.

To see all of the results of the survey, you may download a PDF copy here.