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.

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.

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...

Collaboration Closes the Distance Gap

We respond in real time and expect the same from others we need to exchange information with at a personal level. Employees have come to expect the same experiences from their work environments and the tools that facilitate how they collaborate to do their jobs.

Social networking, webinars and virtual conferencing have ramped up our need to participate. We’re spending more time online interacting with people on a variety of platforms about numerous topics of interest. Essentially, we’re now living in the experience economy, transcending the barriers of time and distance. We rely on technology more than ever for our communication needs.

We respond in real time and expect the same from others we need to exchange information with. Employees have come to expect the same experiences from their work environments and the tools that facilitate how they do their jobs.

The ways in which we utilize digital social and community platforms has removed the necessity for us to be face-to-face with someone for all conversations. We’re becoming adept at getting much of what we need through textual communications.

We’ve all come to rely on email and document attachments. This said, there are some times when the nuances of language and the body language in response to conversations is the key to getting the outcomes that pull a project back on track or cement a relationship with a customer into place.

To keep working at the pace our businesses require, we need the instant gratification of collaboration technology to help us out.

From being able to find the people we need to interact with—along with the best way to contact them in real time—to the ability to escalate the method of communication to get clarity without losing the thread, a technology assist can become a productivity boost.

Consider this typical situation:

• You need answers to questions a customer in Houston raised about project execution in their proposal.


• You locate the expert you need in Boston and see they’re available by Instant Message.


• After a brief exchange, you need to discuss the rewording of a clause in the proposal.


• With one click you escalate the Instant Message session to a web conference.


• You can now see each other on video as well as see the document in the web browser and work together to edit it in real time.


• As you hang up, you save the updated proposal and call your customer. You pop into a web conference and walk her through the updated change, getting her agreement to move forward.

If you tried to accomplish this through standard methods—like sending email or chasing people via voicemail—how much longer would it take to get the same outcome?

How much more value do you think your customer will assign to your efforts given the personalization and speed of your responsiveness via collaborative technology?