The current economic crisis has impacted the travel budgets of most
organizations, among other budget heads of course. While we've received this
response from almost every CIO we've met on various occasions, we decided to
approach a wider base of CIOs to see if similar sentiments existed
everywhere-and the bad news is that they did! We surveyed more than 60 key CIOs
from leading Indian enterprises to find out this and how were they planning to
combat it. More than 60% of them were from mid to large enterprises having a
turnover ranging from 500 to 5000+ crores. More than 80% of them had faced
travel budget cuts. The rest of them were lucky, as they had not faced the
situation yet, and we sure hope others become as lucky as them soon too! But for
now, 23% are facing more than 50% travel budget cuts, 26% have cut it by 30-40%,
and the rest of the math can easily be done; else you can refer to the graphs
for more information. There were also a few who had taken voluntary travel
budget cuts.
The results we got from our survey are very interesting. For one,
organizations today are finding it difficult to manage multiple modes of
communication. There are integration issues, difficulties in organizing meetings
between multiple locations, reaching the right people at the right time, among
others. Given this situation, there is a strong tendency to consider a move
towards a unified communication environment. Our survey results showed that 37%
of the CIOs were planning to deploy unified communication in the near future.
The second most preferred option being considered for future deployment is VoIP.
Interestingly, the most preferred mode of communication amongst our survey
respondents was video conferencing, and more over, the preferences were broken
between standard definition VC, high definition VC, and TelePresence.
Presented in this story are the survey's results, which would provide
insights into what kind of communication channels are in use across Indian
enterprises, the kinds of issues they face with them, and what options are being
considered for future deployment to tackle those issues.
State of communications budgets
Needless to say, the cut in travel budgets has put greater pressure on the
IT departments to enhance their organization's communications systems. 80% of
the CIOs completely agreed with this statement when asked. We were expecting
this greater pressure on the IT department to translate into an increase in IT
budgets for communications systems enhancement for everyone. However, to our
surprise, it didn't. 40% of them said that their IT budgets for communications
were likely to remain the same. This didn't of course mean that they wouldn't
spend anything at all on enhancing their communications systems. It meant that
they already had certain budgets allocated for the task, which were unlikely to
increase, even under so much pressure. There were though, another 26% lucky CIOs,
who were likely to increase their budgets for enhancing their communications
systems because of the pressure. And lastly, there were 27% unlucky ones, whose
budgets were likely to decrease.
But despite all this, there is a positive side of the picture as well-Most
CIOs remain confident of the capabilities of their existing communications
systems. More than 60% of them were completely satisfied or quite satisfied with
their communications systems; while another 25% of them were just satisfied.
This left us with only a few CIOs who were not that satisfied.
These results might appear quite surprising, because on one side there's
greater pressure on the IT departments to enhance the communications systems;
while on the other, CIOs are satisfied with what they already have. Does this
satisfaction mean that CIOs are not facing any issues with their existing
communications systems? Not really.
Assess your communication modes
The communications world has today given us ample technologies to reach out
to others. This may not seem apparent at first, but if you start counting the
number of modes of communication being used in your organization, you'll be
surprised. At the basic level, there are three ways to communicate with
others-voice, video, or data. Now for each mode, there are different
technologies available. For voice, there's PSTN line, mobile phone, and VoIP.
For data, there's email, chat, fax, calendar sharing, whiteboarding, etc. For
video, there are different types of video conferencing-standard definition,
high-definition, web-based, etc. Even within each of these, there are multiple
choices available, and different solutions available from different vendors or
service providers.
In our survey, we split the various modes of communication into 12 parts (see
graph). We kept the most basic modes of communication, like landline phones,
PBXs, email, fax, etc out of the list because there would hardly be an
organization that doesn't have them. Out of the rest, instant messaging was the
most widely deployed mode of communication, followed by audio conferencing.
Surprisingly, the use of BlackBerries and PDAs is gaining ground amongst Indian
enterprises, with 58% of the CIOs saying that they were already using it.
Interestingly, data/web based conferencing solutions are not as widely used.
Only 37% of the CIOs were actually using them. Considering that every
organization today has Internet access, these should actually be the most
commonly used solutions. The newer communication modes, like Presence,
TelePresence, and Unified Communications are not so widely used. 11% of the CIOs
had already deployed unified communications, and a majority of them were from
large, 1000 Cr+ organizations.
Identify the key issues
The biggest challenge organizations face with their existing communications
systems is in organizing meetings across multiple locations. Should it be audio,
video, or data based? This task can be quite daunting. Chances are that you
won't have all three modes of communication deployed across all locations. Two
regions might have video conferencing, while a third region can come in over
audio only. Moreover, the fourth region's person could be on the road and only
reachable on the mobile phone. So you have to figure out the preferred mode of
communication for each region before organizing the meeting.
The next biggest challenge that CIOs face with their communications systems
can be considered as a consequence of the first one--too many parallel
communication channels are actually hampering productivity. There are many
reasons for this, and a discussion of all of them is beyond the scope of this
article. But the main point is that so many communication channels can be used
as well as misused. Or, there can be integration issues between them, leading to
loss of productivity. So having multiple communication channels is a necessary
evil.
The third challenge that CIOs face with their communication system is even
more frustrating--despite having so many communication channels, you just can't
reach the right person at the right time. Although just about every employee
today would have a mobile phone, it's not always reachable. Maybe the battery
has drained off, or the signal is weak, or the person is busy in a meeting, or
something else. To add insult to injury, you're actually paying for so many
different communication channels, and running around trying to manage them. The
last two are also some of the challenges faced by CIOs with their communication
channels.
So obviously, something needs to be done about it. And many of the CIOs who
responded to this question said that they were looking at an integrated solution
that can use all three channels of communication effectively.
Identify what to deploy in the future
Amongst all communication channels, the highest preference is being given to
Unified Communications. More than 50% of the CIOs who had plans to deploy
Unified Communications were from large 1000 Cr+ organizations, while 26% of the
CIOs were from organizations with an annual turnover of 500-1000 crores. While
the technology is preferred by different types of organizations, the two major
sectors where we received the highest responses were IT/ITES and manufacturing.
Next most popular communications technology is VoIP and interestingly, it's
the small to mid-sized enterprises that are more interested in deploying it in
the near future. 59% of the CIOs who said this were from organizations with
sub-1000 crores turnover, and 27% were from organizations with sub-100 Cr annual
turnover. Even more interesting was the fact that 61% of the organizations who
had already deployed VoIP were also from small to mid-sized organizations, and
even more interestingly, 33% of them were <100 crore companies. So there seems
to be a lot of interest amongst smaller organizations to deploy VoIP. In this
issue's cover story, we've talked about how to implement some interesting VoIP
solutions.
Leveraging UC for increased productivity Ernst & Young has used What challenges did your company face,
Did you face any operational or regulatory Tell us about the UC experience after the Tell us the business benefits you have There has been a definite productivity |
Surprisingly, data/web based conferencing is the third choice with 27% of the
CIOs planning to deploy it in the near future. The technology is preferred by
organizations of all sizes, be it sub-1000 Cr or 1000 Cr+.
The technology that seems to be generating the highest interest is Video
Conferencing, and not without good reason. The technology has evolved
considerably over the recent past, and the greatest addition has been the
evolution of High-definition Video Conferencing. Even there, the upper end of
high-end video conferencing is TelePresence. If we combined the votes for
standard definition and high-definition video conferencing, along with the votes
for TelePresence, then this gets the highest preference amongst all other
communications technologies. 55% of the CIOs who participated in our survey were
interested in deploying some form of video conferencing in the future.
The other technologies that were of interest to our survey's respondents can
be seen in the graph.