Pave your Way to Unified Communications

The road to unified communications can be smooth and without any bumps if you have the right strategy for it. We'll look at some of them in this article

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

We last talked about 'Unified Communications' two months ago in which we gave you an insight into the concept. We looked at different building blocks of a unified communications system, the protocols involved, and even went through some sample deployments. This time, we'll talk about what sort of strategy you should adopt if you want to migrate to unified communications. For this, we interacted with key CIOs and IT decision makers across the country. Interestingly, while about half of them didn't have any plans to deploy unified communications, the remaining were at various stages of deployment. Some were awaiting management approval, others had convinced the management and were about to start the roll out, and there were a few who had just finished deploying the same. The ones who had no plans to deploy had several reasons for not doing so. Predominantly, either they didn't feel the need to migrate just yet, or they found it difficult to justify the cost. A few also felt that the technology was still too new and another set of respondents were waiting for others to deploy and test the waters first. Even if you're from the second lot of people who don't plan to deploy unified communications, you'll find this story useful as we've tried to answer most of the apprehensions you have about migrating to the technology.

Where to start?
Our survey indicated that currently, convincing the management to move to unified communication is a herculean task. 93% of them said that the job was difficult. The primary reason for this revolved around justifying the cost and ROI as well as explaining the business benefits. For instance, one key aspect of Unified Communications is move from TDM based voice communication to VoIP. Convincing the management to move to VoIP is still not a very easy job. In fact, one of our respondents said that as the existing cost of communication in the country is not very high, so moving to VoIP doesn't really offer as high a benefit as what it might offer in other countries. Possibly this is just a mindset problem, where we want to use old things till they work, as pointed out by one of our respondents. But then, if the management still feels that way, then it must be convinced. Another point that you may need to convince the management about are the legal implications. VoIP still has some legal hurdles in the country, so you would need to find the right answers to overcome them for your organization.

There are several things you can do to make it easier to convince the management. First is to get your own views about unified communications clear. Understand what it really is and what it means to you. Unified Communications, as the name suggests, is about integrating multiple communications channels in your organization, so that it becomes easier for people to communicate with each other. So first you need to identify the channels you already have in place and the challenges you're facing with them. According to a majority of our respondents, the very existence of multiple communications channels was hampering productivity of their employees. All problems stemmed from this one problem. Due to this, it was becoming difficult to reach the right people at the right time. Moreover, managing so many communications channels was itself becoming quite a task, and not to mention the cost of owning so many channels. So start by identifying the key issue you're facing with your communications channels and what would it take to integrate them. This would help you figure out the approximate cost and effort that would be required for the migration. Incidentally, more than 50% of the respondents to our survey already had audio/video conferencing and instant messaging in place. Slightly more than 40% of the respondents were already using calendar sharing, while another 39% had already shifted to IP telephony. Another 31% were already using online Web conferencing facilities. If you already have these setup in your organization, then the move to unified communications would be easier.

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