UC: a user-centric approach

Mark Buckley Head of Enterprise Business Group, Alcatel-Lucent

Unified Communications (UC) can have significant benefits to an organisation’s productivity, speed of communication and business processes, streamlining systems and helping workers be more agile and mobile. However, a number of challenges exist in integrating a successful platform and resellers play a key role in supporting this process – although for many resellers, this may require a change in approach and skill-sets.
We live in an “always on” world, one in which a steady stream of content flows to global users over a wide variety of tools and technologies. Wherever we are, we expect content to be delivered quickly, reliably and securely.

While developments such as instant messaging and mobile phones speed information flow, critical communication still sometimes fails to reach its intended recipients in a timely manner. In workplaces, this can mean loss of productivity and revenue. In industry sectors such as healthcare and public safety, missed communication can sometimes literally become a matter of life and death.

UC connects people with the information they need to be productive – seamlessly, and over a variety of devices and applications. UC brings together multiple communication types: voice, video, conferencing and collaboration, voicemail, email, instant messaging, and presence awareness. In doing so, it helps streamline business processes, allowing enterprises of every size to be more responsive to market opportunities. Benefits of UC are especially apparent as employees become more mobile, since mobile and remote workers – a rapidly growing segment of the workforce – are particularly dependent upon web-based devices and applications to keep in touch with colleagues and customers.

User expectations

Recently, Alcatel-Lucent surveyed more than 2000 end-users about work environment communication flow. Twenty percent reported receiving more than 100 emails per day, and 38 percent used at least five communication tools – including email, fixed-line phones, mobile phones, voicemail and instant messaging. While travelling, 41 percent of users reported using at least two wireless devices.

Rather than ensuring productivity, multiple tools left the majority of those surveyed feeling “unreachable” at times. Furthermore, 72 percent reported they didn’t have contact details on hand when trying to urgently reach someone. To receive information, the majority of users, 56 percent, preferred having a single, follow-me number – and 64 percent preferred to check all types of messages in a single place.

UC models not only simplify the flow of information among individuals, work groups and companies, but they co-ordinate and integrate these interactions with business applications to increase overall organisational efficiency. Software solutions such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain management have a direct impact on the profitability of businesses, and their effectiveness is enhanced by enabling them with communication services.

In the early stages of development, UC implementation was slow due to factors including product/application complexity and the extensive legacy technology investments by some enterprises. Today, vendors and industry analysts are confident that UC provides competitive advantages to companies that make the transition in conjunction with strategic evaluation of their particular communication requirements.

Integrating a UC platform – challenges for resellers

While the drivers for UC are compelling, businesses can face a number of key challenges when they look to implement a UC approach. The reseller plays a central role here, although for those resellers new to UC, a change in typical approach may be needed.

Firstly, as UC is about supporting and improving business-level processes and systems – from the supply chain to customer relationship management – the person in an organisation responsible for implementing a UC approach is likely to be a business manager, rather than the IT function within an organisation.

Knowing who to approach and then being able to discuss UC at a business – rather than an IT – level is key to helping businesses integrate UC successfully. This may mean developing a different relationship contact in the organisation and/or up-skilling the sales team to understand the specific business drivers behind UC.

It’s important this approach is tailored for the individual organisation and its type of workforce, as depending on the industry, the size of the business and the types of employees, each customer is likely to have significantly different needs.

Secondly, the reseller must be skilled at addressing the challenges that organisations face when integrating UC into their existing IT platforms.

Perhaps the largest consideration is providing the appropriate levels of support and advice to an organisation’s employees in order to help them integrate UC practices into their workflow and everyday activities. Resellers need to help the organisation address employee requirements, identify the levels of education and support needed and help to implement successful training schemes to get employees up to speed.

Concurrently, resellers must help organisations understand how to ensure application performance and quality of service (QoS) in order to provide a superior user experience that encourages and supports usage.