This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by Unified Communication Strategies:

Unified Communication Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers and other information on the UC industry. Visit our website for more detail: http://www.ucstrategies.com/

As the UC suppliers jockey for position with their product offerings, many potential enterprise buyers are scratching their heads and wondering what UC will do for them-in these days of carefully watched budget priorities, benefits have to be clearly demonstrable. So I offer this cautionary advice to UC suppliers and to those who are considering purchasing their products: Work hard to link UC implementation directly into improving business processes.

In my consulting work, one observation occurs so frequently that I now refer to it as the Iron Law of Budget Priorities: If a new product isn’t either customer facing or demonstrating bottom-line impact, it won’t get a favorable reception from the corporate custodians of the Capex purse.

Almost every supplier presentation that I’ve ever seen about UC starts with the challenges of getting in touch with someone, and all of the various phone numbers, device codes, email addresses, IM identifiers, and other avatars that most of us have today. Then the pitch usually proceeds to the bane of multiple messages-a voice mail alerting someone to check email, etc., etc. The solution offered is full of “any”-reach anyone anywhere, using any device, any network, any time. Next comes an assertion about how UC improves personal productivity and saves time.

Folks, we’ve been down this road before. A decade ago, the voice mail industry was seeking to reinvent itself as Unified Messaging. (Back then, some suppliers even called it “Unified Communications,” and now we’re paying for that flight of fancy in market confusion.) The notion was that by enabling voice mail access on desktop interfaces, commingling all messaging traffic together, possibly keeping it on one storage device, that great benefits would accrue. In particular, it would save users a lot of time, and make their communications much more efficient.

But Unified Messaging basically went nowhere. I think that’s because it failed to meet the Iron Law requirements.

My word of caution to suppliers and potential purchasers is simple: It isn’t enough to show how much easier it will be to make connections though UC. The logical question from the CFO is, “OK, it’s easier, so what?”

Any UC proponent-supplier, buyer or consultant-has to be able to answer that “so what?” question. And the best way is to show exactly how UC directly improves either the customer experience or the company’s bottom line by increasing revenues or decreasing costs.

In a recent Issue of the UC eWeekly, my colleague Marty Parker gave an example of UC capabilities resulted in sales increases of 10% (see Issue 3, Nov. 1: Leveraging Spending With Unified Communications). That’s a lot different than a supplier’s claim about how much easier it is to reach someone. It answers the “so what?” question by linking better communications to the bottom line.

How do better communications improve business processes? Typically, the answer is improved cycle time-speed. Better communications eliminate “human latency”-the time that a process languishes while waiting for the next person in the chain to provide an answer, approval or input. Faster answers improve customer satisfaction, close more business deals, and frequently reduce costs.

Because UC is new, we’re still working on frameworks and “use cases” to help companies identify how business processes are improved via UC, and on measuring the results. As these process improvements get implemented, we’ll report the examples and the impacts in upcoming issues of UC eWeekly and on our websites-http://www.vanguard.net and http://www.ucstrategies.com

In the meantime, let’s all focus on how UC directly contributes to business process improvements. That’s the road to real results that meet today’s investment criteria. As you and your colleagues wrestle with this issue, I hope you’ll send us your ideas, experiences and thoughts.

Don Van Doren
President, Vanguard Communications
Co-founder, UC Strategies.com

Posted in Don Van Doren, Unified Communications, Usability |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.