Unified Communications: It's the Journey, Not the Destination (Part One).

Posted by Neal Shact, on July 11, 2008

Unified Communications (UC) seems destined to be "The Next Big Thing" in the communications world. It's the ultimate outcome of the path that started with Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), VoIP, Convergence and now wireless. What started as the promise of delivering the benefits of desktop integration, of integrating voice and data, now can extend functionality out to wireless devices. That's the plan anyway.

The first step to deploying UC is to come up with defining what you are trying to accomplish. To some, it is another way of saying how they want to deploy Presence and have it integrate to voice, voice mail and email. Others want to accomplish this goal but also extend this functionality out to wireless devices. Lastly, some organizations are looking at this deployment not as an end, but as a means to stepping into SOA and embedding all of these mediums within their key enterprise applications such as ERP systems.

As my colleague, Blair Pleasant from COMMfusion says, "UC is a vision or philosophy that leads to solutions - it is not a product". The Journey is about understanding what you have, and whether that product (or its derivative on its roadmap) is one that you want to move forward with. Of at least equal importance is your confidence in the organizations to deliver the future products you want. Unlike stand alone products in the past, whose software was mostly self-contained, emerging software-driven products require a greater degree of skill to deploy since they are going into more complex environments and interoperate with more diverse sets of software and networks. In this increasingly complex environment, good working relationships, knowing your environment and working with your users are key determinants for success. How you migrate forward is paramount. Having users receive improved productivity benefits, not less productivity is the key to satisfying your user community.

This is your journey, not your vendors.

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Comment posted by Art Rosenberg, on July 12, 2008

I think you are heading in the right direction, but I also think the starting point for the UC "journey" has to be more fundamental than technology replacement. More specifically, it's not just what technology changes an organization wants to make, but what existing business communication and operational work flow problems it wants to fix for individual end users and their roles in business processes. The "who," "what," and "why" of UC migration has to be defined before before the "how" and "when." That is what internal IT management or technology providers really need as input for their UC implementation and migration planning priorities. As people and information become more "virtual" (teleworking, mobility), the need for end users to be more flexible and responsive multimodally will increase. Since the new generation of "smart-phones" will provide greater communication interface flexibility to all end users, that will change the landscape of traditional business communications. So, one way to look at where business UC is going is to assume that most consumers, whether they are employees, business partners, or customers, will eventually have their own smartphone device and every organization will have to support their particular business processes and online application services on such devices (just like PCs on the Internet). The main focus of UC is in how to let different end users and automated applications initiate and respond to individual business contacts with people more conveniently and efficiently, regardless of the modes of interaction.