A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by AVST:

Click here to view the VoiceCon Webinar: Unifying Communications Through Interoperability of Your Telephony and Data Infrastructure.

This webinar presents a case study from Del Monte Foods, with insights from a leading analyst and technology producer. The session provides enterprise customers with a strategy that enables them to deliver productivity enhancing Unified Communications applications today with minimum impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, telephony and data infrastructure, resulting in a strong ROI on your investments.

Unified Communications (UC) introduces change at many levels of a public or private enterprise:

• Technology changes from monolithic or vertically-oriented products to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which enables user interfaces and portals to utilize multiple services and/or applications; both the interfaces and the applications operate on a single converged network.
• UC-based changes in both User Productivity (UC-UP) and Business Processes (UC-BP) as described in a recent issue of this newsletter. UC technology and investments make sense only in the context of the business benefits they provide, and some enterprises have already used to UC to achieve breakthroughs in revenues, costs, services levels, and/or bottom line results.
• Organization changes to align telecom and IT around new technologies and business processes. UC introduces new clients, new services and mixed-mode mashups far beyond earlier models of just converging phone-for-voice and desktop/PC-for-data. Let’s look at this type of change.

There is a lot of concurrence that organization topics are part of the UC picture. Just last month, Steve Blood of Gartner warned that “…more than 80 per cent of appropriate organisational changes, including procedures, policies and compensation, will lag behind technological change through 2011.”

The most common UC-based organizational question is how to blend the telecom team, the e-mail/desktop applications team and the mobile devices team to deliver the blended UC applications.

For telecom teams, this means handing off the network layer as shared gateways replace dedicated ports and trunks, and as mobile and desktop interfaces supplement or even replace the telephone.

For the e-mail/desktop and mobile device teams, the technology and roles are distributed between the application servers (Exchange, Domino, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, etc.) and the desktop or mobile clients (Office Communicator, Sametime, Blackberry and user portals). The desktop or mobile clients, especially the portals, are increasingly expected to integrate multiple services (e.g. voice or video communications, enterprise transaction data, etc.) with their traditional functions of e-mail, IM or data viewing.

To assist enterprises in considering and acting on these issues, UniComm Consulting has posted a white paper. The recommendation is that organizational elements be established for:

• User Experiences: This team identifies, configures and manages the interfaces that the users see. The team would define a small number (about five) primary use cases to assist the employees in optimally performing their jobs.
• Applications and Services: This team manages the applications software that enables the functionality delivered through the user interfaces, including the enterprise data resources. Often a specialized team in this group will manage the servers and Operating Systems (OS).
• Network Operations: This team designs, deploys and manages the converged network in support of all user devices and applications. This includes the interfaces to the public networks (Internet, PSTN, Wireless).

This structure enhances your ability to integrate communications into business processes, since neither the applications nor the user interfaces are compartmentalized by brands or functions. Also, the networking team is able to have a clear view of the aggregate requirements, loads and service levels.

The crucial User Support organization is now better able to accomplish its mission, since they can organize their user-facing teams around the well-defined use cases. The support organization may also include provisioning and Tier 1 and 2 support for user devices and the application images provisioned on those devices.

These three organizational groups are supported by staff roles including CTO/Architect, Security Standards and Audit, and Project Management. Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are negotiated and managed between each pair of organizations.

Of course, there are many variations to this theme, but this type of reference model can add value to the evolution of your organization as you move into the brave new world of UC.

What do you think about this? Drop me a note with your thoughts about organizational issues and challenges at mparker@UniCommConsulting.com or post comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Marty Parker
UniComm Consulting LLC

Posted in Implementation, Management, Marty Parker, Presence, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, Wireless/Mobility |

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