IT Roadmap

Dynamic collaboration across enterprise and inter-enterprise boundaries represents "the new normal." Organizations are now challenged to work closely with suppliers, partners and contractors to deliver their offerings in today's high velocity markets.

"Web 2.0 tools such as video portals, podcasts, blogs, wikis, and discussion forums are changing the way in which information is created, published, managed, and consumed," according to a recent report from Cisco. "Technology advances and the need to work outside of normal business hours and locations fosters an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. A flood of new devices and applications is entering the corporate IT environment as employees elect to merge consumer-based tools with standardized communications."

As organizations grapple with global value chains, information overload, and more mobile workforces, they are challenged to embrace and integrate new collaboration capabilities.

"As the number of intra- and intercompany stakeholders increases, the number of collaborative tools and communication formats increases," states the report. "In other words, the scope of collaboration must be broadened. It must combine document- and text-centric collaboration — such as email messaging, instant messaging (IM), team workspaces, and conferencing — with voice, video, and context to fully support the needs of the business."

Cisco contends that enterprises will need to recognize several key principles as they implement collaboration technology and infrastructure in the coming years. Among them:

• An interoperable, open architecture: As collaboration increasingly occurs across organizations and with people on the move, it is no longer a given that IT can control the devices and applications used in collaborative sessions. Today’s environment requires an interoperable, open architecture that allows for any device or application to use a core set of collaborative services.


• Secure inter-company collaboration: Organizations will increasingly move from collaboration within functions to intra-company collaboration to inter-company collaboration. In this environment, securely enabling collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers as if they were behind the firewall is fundamental.


• Flexible deployment models: IT requires the flexibility to adjust to a dynamically changing business and technology environment. Enterprise and IT architects do not make decisions in the context of on-premises versus on-demand, but seek to couple the robustness, security, and performance of the enterprise network with the openness and flexibility of collaboration through the cloud.

Strategic planners in IT need to ensure they construct a core foundation that supports a rapidly evolving set of applications — one that also optimizes the various media types that comprise today’s collaborative experience. They'll need an open architecture that secures collaboration and supports multiple approaches to deployment.

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The communication landscape has dramatically changed with the widespread use of devices such as smart phones and iPads. Do you remember what it was like saying ‘I’m sorry I missed your call, I wasn’t home’? In the new normal that excuse doesn’t stand. Most people have cell phones and the caller may have a myriad of other options to contact you—including email, instant messaging, alternative phone numbers, etc. Add the adoption of social media to the equation and you’ll see how the way we think about communication, maintaining relationships, time and mobility has changed.

Social media has become an integrated part of daily life for many of us. We can see at anytime what our friends and colleagues are doing, check their whereabouts and have chat sessions via a webcam with people around the world we’ve never met in person.  During the infant phase some may have questioned the purpose and value of social media; who would waste their time on this? The reality, after six years, is that Facebook has 400 million active users, of which 50% log on every day! In March 2010, Facebook surpassed Google in traffic numbers for the first time in history (Nielson).

The benefits of this new communication culture reach far beyond the casual chats now available in our personal lives. The adoption of unified communication at work will be easier for people who are familiar with social media. Unified communications is based on the same concepts.

Take a look at some of the similarities between Social Media and Unified Communications:

Presence is similar to updating your status on Gchat, checking into Foursquare to let people know your current location and knowing which friends are available to chat on Facebook. Updating your status will let others know what response time they can expect from you and the way in which they prefer to be contacted at that time.

Presence can be tied to an individual, but also to a certain role within the company. Say a client has an urgent question for the sales department; instead of trying to call several people the client gets routed to a sales rep marked as available.

Instant Messaging with colleagues is similar to using Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Facebook live chat. Because we know how to use those applications, adopting it in a business context is simplified.

Many companies have employees, partners and clients all over the country, as well as abroad. Using instant messaging allows for faster file sharing, real-time feedback and a more personal connection between parties.

Video conferencing is similar to using Gchat or Skype to talk to family and friends. Using video conferencing for customer and project team meetings brings virtual workgroups closer by sharing files via workspaces, videoconferencing puts faces to voices and live-streaming company trainings helps to keep all employees up to speed, regardless of location.

Streamlining business complexities through unified communication provides many benefits to businesses including shortening response time lines and making information available for employees whenever, wherever.

Connecting through internal messaging systems can result in faster service to clients and more effective collaboration toward the achievement of business objectives. Using (video) conference calls for direct collaboration between co-workers and clients that are not physically on the same site saves money, shortens time to decisions and reduces the human latency incurred by having your best executives on the road.

The use of social media has fostered the on-the-go mentality and mobility life-style. Social media users are no strangers to concepts such as presence, instant messaging and videoconferencing. Businesses can capitalize on this new skill set people have acquired through social media adoption when introducing unified communication to the enterprise.

Thanks to Nicolle van Rouwendaal, from our partner WebMedley, for working with us to create today's blog post. If you'd like to see samples of the UC work we've done with our customers, you'll find examples here

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