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.
For example, with the convergence of a range of communications applications onto the IP network, resellers need to ensure both the network capacity and storage systems are capable of dealing with increased demands on the network from applications such as VoIP, unified messaging and video/web conferencing.

And, businesses rolling out a UC solution must not only look at current network requirements but also be prepared for the growth in network traffic over a future period. As traffic increases and requirements on bandwidth and network capacity increase, resellers need to ensure the business is able to maintain appropriate levels of quality of service for all applications. This means not just understanding where the business is at today, but having insight into its medium- and long-term objectives, growth targets and future plans.

Failure to provide a consistent, well-supported UC user experience risks counteracting the many benefits that the platform can provide. To mitigate this risk the role of the reseller is central to providing insight into how the technology can be integrated to meet an organisation’s short-term and longer-term needs.

Merging technology with user needs

As a guide to addressing the different types of business requirements around UC from a workforce perspective, Alcatel-Lucent has taken an innovative approach, focusing its offerings squarely on the needs of users. The following five key “user profiles” have been developed to categorise the ways enterprise employees communicate:

• Executives, a group that includes senior managers, doctors and “C” level people, need a rich combination of telephony, messaging, collaborative tools, and mobility to support their intense level of communication. They also require access to these services at any time, in any place, and on any device.

• Mobile professionals include sales representatives, channel sales managers and customer support engineers. These users need to switch easily between their mobile and office environments without sacrificing quality of service or incurring extraordinary expense. Mobile professionals spend about 60 percent of their time outside the office.

• On-site roamers have duties that take them away from individual workstations but still need to be reachable. Roamers include security guards, duty nurses, production heads, hospital directors, and others who depend on mobile devices and applications in a campus environment.

• Office workers have little need for mobility, but benefit from unified messaging services and communication over multiple devices, such as PCs and phones. Administrative assistants, legal officers, accounting clerks and sales operations managers are examples.

• Team workers may also have low mobility needs, typically spending about 70 percent of their time at their desks, but they’re highly dependent on cross-functional communication and teamwork. Conferencing and multimedia collaboration services are often essential to these workers, who include design executives, marketing specialists, research managers and project managers.

Communication solutions targeted to various-sized enterprises and levels of usage intensity have been bundled according to specific user needs. The profiles can be ordered as a single item. This simplified go-to-market approach streamlines the ordering process for sales channels while ensuring customers can quickly implement solutions tailored to the requirements of their organisations.

Integrated applications for UC

Alcatel-Lucent envisions that an organisation’s performance will be linked to its ability to integrate core assets – people, network, processes and knowledge – with secure, always-on communications. In this model, every single interaction between employees, partners and customers becomes a business opportunity.

The reseller has a central role to play in communicating this message to businesses and ensuring they are able to effectively integrate a UC approach into their work practices, processes and systems.

Resellers can demonstrate how UC applications support a vision for the enterprise that optimises communications by setting access policies and permissions, aggregating and compiling messages into a single view, and providing multi-device access to information. The results are increased productivity, reduced business latency, breakdown of the business process silos that inhibit innovation, and an enhanced user experience.

The challenge for the reseller is to fully understand both the business drivers behind UC and understand how to integrate the solution into diverse businesses with different requirements and different types of users.

Doing this well means a chance to help organisations take advantage of UC tools to meet the evolving expectations of employees and customers, providing a compelling and competitive edge for future growth.