Having been researching and working around Unified Communications for just over 2 years I am seeing more and more a disconnect as to what Unified Communications is. It should be simple the two words chosen to describe the harmonious way of working are described as follows:
Unify v.t. reduce (things, or abs.) to unity or uniformity
Communication n. 1.act of imparting (esp. news);information given;paper read to learned society;social dealings access;common door or passage or road or rail or telephone or other connection between places
When talking to customers its easy to get caught up in the hype and the marketing around this solution. Every so often its good to take a step back and look at what you are asking the business to do by investing in a Unified Communication solution. Looking at the words its simple, you are asking the business to challenge the way in which they currently work, by breaking down and choosing the methods in which they communicate.
By asking the business to do this you are actually challenging the employee and person to change there own habits and by doing this you are asking a business to invest time and money into the people they employee to grow the business and its profits. James makes a good point about this challenge with his requirement to reduce email. It would seem that even with the use of IM, Voice, Wiki’s, Portal technology his use of email has increased by 3x as much.
So the real challenge businesses will have when implementing a Unified Communications solutions is not so much the technology and the integration of the said technology, it really is the person, the end user, you and me making use of the UC solution available.
August 19, 2008 at 7:54 am
In my experience phrases that describe a technology alway degrade over time – it’s an interesting phenomena within the technology arena as a whole.
People have multiple meanings when they talk about “collaboration”, “email”, “service”, “server”.
It’s not surprising the UC has the same problem.
I think that the real challenge for UC is to define the real benefits. For me, reduction in email would be down in the lower order in the list. In my experience people could do far more to manage their email volume with the tools that they already have available. If their mailbox is out of control then UC isn’t going to fix it.
The value of UC, has to be about one of two things: break the location boundaries of business (space), break the time boundaries of business, preferably both.