AMS.NET Blog

Why move from Telephony to Unified Communications?

As we dive into the year 2012, is increasing performance and productivity top of mind? If the answer is yes, you are not alone. Each year, businesses of all types and sizes strive to increase productivity in order to gain a competitive edge. A unified communications system does more than just provide call connectivity; it can be a valuable tool to enable employees to increase productivity. Unified communications provides features to speed up decisions, reduce response times and improve cross-department communication all resulting in increased productivity.

According to Aberdeen Research, businesses achieve the greatest value from a unified communication solution through mobility, presence, web conferencing among other integrated communication features.

Mobility
Mobility refers to providing a single business voice mailbox and a single-number-reach application that intelligently manages, filters, routes and connects calls between a worker’s IP desk phone and mobile cellular or home phone. Users can transition active calls between their IP phone and mobile phone without interruption. Employees can originate enterprise calls from a mobile or other remote phone as if they were calling from their desk IP phone. With mobility, remote workers have the same directories and call resources as headquarter-based employees and users can provide more responsive service with no additional effort.

• Give callers one number to dial
• Remain mobile by moving active calls between desk and mobile phone
• Direct unanswered calls to a single voicemail box

Presence
Presence allows employees to easily communicate regardless of their physical location. Presence indicators show the availability of colleagues based on the desktop, mobile, telephony and calendar information to reduce communication delays. They also indicate the most appropriate communication method such as phone or instant messaging. Presence can also facilitate instant messaging between Cisco Unified Communications and other applications.

• Speed up decisions by viewing availability information prior to making a call
• Increase first-call resolution by quickly reaching appropriate resource
• Improve customer satisfaction with proper call routing

Web Conferencing
Web Conferencing allows employees to simultaneously speak to each other and customers while sharing content. Web conferencing is available on-premise, off-premise or a hybrid solution that takes advantage of on-premise audio conferencing with off-premise web conferencing. These tools allow remote or distributed employees to easily communicate face-to-face without travel costs. Employees can also increase customer face-time with web conferencing tools.

• Improve meeting effectiveness with audio and content sharing
• Increase customer face-to-face time without travel costs
• Support sales meetings, marketing events or corporate announcements

Businesses large or small benefit from an integrated Unified Communications solution. Small to mid-size businesses need to scale and work more efficiently to stay competitive. With mobility features and conferencing, employees can frequently stay in contact with employees and customers wherever they are located. Large businesses with a distributed workforce can improve communications and speed up decisions with mobility and presence information. Upgrading to a unified communications solution can give your business the tools to increase productivity and gain a competitive edge.

Business Video – Much More than a Broadcast

It’s not uncommon for most people online to watch one or more videos in the course of their day. Watching video has become a standard and common Internet experience. Most of you are probably familiar with YouTube – unarguably one of the most popular places to find and share videos online. But, video is not just for public use and it’s no longer only a one-way, broadcast experience.

New solutions are offering many different ways to use interactive one-to-one or one-to-many experiences that enable the back and forth communication of conversations and collaboration that enhance the ways in which you do business. In fact, Cisco predicts that, in the next 3 years, over 90% of Internet traffic will be video. Therefore it makes sense to consider how video can improve business interactions for your company.

Consider the following uses and benefits of business video:

Meetings: With WebEx, you can use your company’s executive talent to best advantage by enabling them to participate in meetings and events from remote locations. The experience with WebEx transforms the experience from the conference calls where participants are heard, but not seen. In a meeting using WebEx, you see the people in your meeting, speak with them and share documents, slide decks and other materials used to facilitate the conversation—all through using computers and even smartphones to stream live video.

This interactive, live experience provides a powerful way to interact with a few people, or many—without the cost or logistics of travel. You’ll also find that projects are completed faster and better.

Organizational Communications: As more companies embrace mobility, workforces become distributed across a variety of locations, making it more difficult to have company-wide meetings that keep everyone up to date on the latest company strategies and objectives.

Cisco Show and Share enables your company to establish a private community where users can easily create, edit and upload videos to share with those who need to see, hear and understand the communications. Transcripts can be easily displayed, enabling people to search for and interact with the specific part of a communication that applies to them. Within that segment of the video, they can add feedback and notes to expand and clarify the meaning and intention as they work together to collaborate on how to best meet stated objectives.

Training and Professional Development: As the markets we work in expand and change, companies that invest in the continuous training and evolution of their workforces will reap the most benefits. That used to mean sending people off to training courses and taking them out of the workforce for the duration, resulting in increased costs for providing professional development.

Now this education can be facilitated through a live or archived session on WebEx, or within your Show and Share community. The Internet has driven our ability to self-educate. Now, you can provide the highest level of education to keep your talent in step with innovations by allowing them to access and participate in training from wherever they may be, on any device.

The Time for Business Video is Now

Video is becoming an important part of our communication. As humans, we have an overwhelming need to see and hear and interact with others while conducting business. Trust and credibility are built much faster when you have the ability to put people in the “room” together.

It’s also important to note just how easy the technology to create video has become. From simple to use, handheld Flip video cameras to looking into the video cameras built into our laptops, smartphones and tablets, it’s never been easier to create, use, and stream video to facilitate the interactive experiences that drive successful business outcomes.

Unified Communications – The Platform for Change

The new normal for businesses today—from SMB to enterprise concerns—includes information overwhelm, national or even global value chains and escalating market competition. The traditional ways of doing things are no longer capable of producing the results our companies need to maintain competitive advantage. In a world driven by knowledge and interactions, it’s time to consider the advantages of unified communications as a platform to embrace change.

Does your company need to:

• Connect employees, customers, suppliers and partners with a wide variety of information and each other—accessible in real time?


• Provide access to critical business information to an increasingly mobile workforce?


• Improve workforce productivity just to keep up with day-to-day tasks?


• Identify and quickly locate experts for customer issue resolution or project completion?


• Communicate effectively and efficiently between different office locations?


• Reduce travel for key executives to reduce downtime?

Collaboration is most effective when enabled by a multi-layered approach that provides the right tools for sharing information and communicating more efficiently. Depending upon how you define your organization’s need for collaboration, you may not have considered unified communications as the right option for you. But, in reality, it could be just exactly what you need.

Unified communications can be implemented iteratively so that you harness what you need as you need it. Consider for example if your definition of collaboration is restricted to information access. Using a file server approach may have worked fine in the past, but it likely doesn’t do so well as your workforce becomes more mobile and needs to access that information from a variety of means, such as a web interface, a client application or a mobile device. Unified communications can answer that need with less overhead than trying to modify your file server approach.

Or, perhaps your company considers collaborative tools as the answer for managing your employee’s time. If this were the case, you may have focused on a calendaring system that includes contacts and task management. But, just accommodating scheduling will not improve employee efficiency to the point that you’ve maximized benefits to the business.

Consider instead that presence enables your company to locate the best available expert at the exact time they can provide value. Instant messaging can reduce the time spent on meetings when a simple question and answer session can speed time to task completion. And, video conferencing can elevate the quality of meeting productiveness.

However you’ve approached collaboration in the past may be leaving healthy benefits on the table that can transform what you thought of as the best approach. You can add the services and tools as your needs evolve without reinventing the wheel each time some new capability becomes a requirement rather than a nice to have.

Those are only a few examples of how unified communications can serve as a platform for change. Don’t you think that perhaps it’s time for you to reconsider how you’re defining collaboration to make sure that you’re getting the optimal results for your company?

YouTube! for the Enterprise - But Better!

Many businesses have embraced rich media and created channels on YouTube! to share videos with prospects, customers and employees. However, exponential possibilities exist for secure video communities that enable members to easily create and share videos, collaborate with higher relevance and eliminate time spent searching for specific information housed within the videos, themselves.

Take education, for example. Schools are able to create distance learning programs that are accessible to a global student body. Self-paced learning means that time zones are not the logistical quagmire that existed when sessions were presented via live streaming presentations.  The ability to automatically create transcripts from the audio enables students to choose the format that works best for them, or to easily search for an exact reference within a video and find it instantly either by tag or search phrase.

Even better, collaboration and shared learning is encouraged by allowing students to enter comments that are reflected within the video flow at the appropriate place.

Imagine the differences in enterprise training programs or team collaboration that can take place with the ease of accessing the community from anywhere at any time and participating in a conversation that’s highly relevant based on a specific point in the training or materials presented.

Ease of Use Based on Intuitive Interface and Toolset

Because Cisco Show and Share works with most USB or built-in computer cameras and microphones, creating videos is simple and easy. You don’t need to worry about making a mistake as the system includes tools for editing and splitting clips as well as inserting slides in sync with your subject matter.

Video is Exploding

Research on YouTube! shows that people are watching 2 billion videos a day and uploading more than 24 hours of video every single minute of the day. Once you understand that it’s estimated that YouTube! only accounts for 26% of the world’s video audience, you can see the impact that video is having on how we work, play and learn. Implementing a secure video community to enable rich interaction through video and collaboration could just be the killer app for transforming your enterprise or learning programs.

Rising to the Next Level of Collaboration

First coined by MIT researcher Andrew McAfee in 2006, the term “Enterprise 2.0” has captured a great deal of attention in recent years. The term, as he defines it, refers to “a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done. “

In a recent white paper from SOVOS Group, authors Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel explain how this concept is evolving as organizations seek to integrate new collaborative tools and technologies with their existing applications and infrastructure. 

“Openness, transparency, agility, collaboration and social computing are currently highly fashionable values, but applying them to achieve specific business value with both existing and new Web 2.0 technologies while attempting to manage employee change for effective use is highly challenging,” they write, suggesting that companies must now focus on new business and technology designs.

While enterprises have often expressed a great deal of interest in collaborative initiatives and technologies, the reality has frequently been “different fiefdoms…with little interaction between specialized groups competing for prestige, work and budget,” they note.

Going forward, the authors see companies making impressive gains as collaborative technologies and platforms are increasingly adopted in the enterprise. “The tremendous waves of innovation from Enterprise 2.0 technology vendors, serving a market vastly more exacting and demanding than the consumer space, have provided platforms and tools to enable these culture change initiatives,” according to the paper.

Indeed, the authors point to several business processes now being enhanced by investments in Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Among them:

• Customer Relationship Management – enabling enterprises to rapidly handle exceptions, rally around customer needs and apply social media to attract new customers.


• Product Innovation – opening up networks of innovation and product design to a wider array of participants and collaborators.


• HR and Talent Management – providing a wider array of input and perspectives to evaluate employee performance and a more extensive platform for attracting talent.


• Channel Relationship Management – enabling enterprises to engage partners in ongoing dialogues and context-specific help in order to support customers and prospects.


• Supply Chain Management – streamlining on-boarding, resolving disputes and reducing risk to drive operational excellence in the supply chain.

Clearly, important gains are now being made on these fronts as collaboration rises to new levels. However, enterprises will need to formulate their own Enterprise 2.0 strategies to realize such gains.

To effectively capitalize on the Enterprise 2.0 vision, organizations should look for guidance from partners who can help them develop the plans, objectives, metrics, solutions and change management approaches that will lead to successful adoption and results. As the array of possible applications outlined here suggests, there’s now an extraordinary opportunity to turn new collaborative platforms into drivers of high performance business.

Collaboration in Action: Key Applications for Unified Communications

What are the major applications of Unified Communication that have emerged in today’s enterprises? That’s a question addressed here in this brief video featuring Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting.



Take a look at 5 major application areas for unified communications:

1. Incoming Contact Management. These applications address the needs of individuals within an organization who are directly interacting with customers, suppliers and other outside parties. They may be receiving calls or other forms of inbound communication. Key applications include presence, click to communicate, conferencing, automated call routing and the ability to incorporate content into an interaction.


2. Information for Mobile Personnel. These apps are focused on field personnel.  Information flows out to these individuals, they see it on their mobile devices, and they have an opportunity to respond – perhaps click to communicate. They might communicate via text or a phone call. The key is that they remain linked to the enterprise when they are mobile.


3. Collaboration for Acceleration. These apps are for the people in the middle of the business who are creating new products, policies and ideas. These individuals are focused on getting new ideas to market as rapidly as possible. They might be most active in collaborative workspaces and other social tools that enable shared creation.  They are intent on sharing and producing ideas – relying on communication technology that’s built into their workflows and processes.


4. Resource Identification for Problem Resolution. These apps are designed for individuals responsible for solving problems.  Instead of manually seeking out individuals and resources to help them solve problems, they now have the ability to click a button and run software-driven search. Such actions will help them determine who is available and who might be able to help them solve particular problems. Collaborative applications could include instant messaging, a voice conversation, web sharing application or a video conference.


5. Communication-Enabled Portals. These apps are generally directed to individuals who are running operations. They may be actively using particular business applications such as SAP or SalesForce.com. Unified Communication could give them the ability to collaborate from within their software applications. 

Unified Communication is now transforming enterprises on many levels. By being aware of these types of apps and their business implications, promoters of collaborative technology put themselves in a strong position to make the case for new investments.

Assess the ROI on UC by Impact to Process Outcomes

The promise of unified communications (UC) is under consideration by many CIOs. Often, the issue keeping them from taking action is the difficulty of proving ROI.  However, there may be a way around that. Instead of focusing on getting a return directly from the technology, measure the difference in process outcomes that occurs once you've added collaboration capabilities into the mix.

Unarguably, in a knowledge-based business environment, the need to improve worker productivity is growing. Whether due to less budget for new hires or the requirements to meet strategic company objectives, the need to do more with less is a refrain that continues into 2010. 

Productivity inhibitors include:

• Limited access to information and colleagues.


• Delays to decisions based on the ability to locate and connect with subject-matter experts.


• Inability for geographically dispersed or traveling team members to participate as needed.

Collaboration capabilities can lessen or even eliminate those limitations. This often means the difference between hitting milestones and managing customer needs or dealing with delays and pushing deadlines that result in diminished customer satisfaction.

When companies enable collaboration for project teams, they are applying UC to an activity that can be measured; for instance, start and end dates, milestone goals, and deliverable requirements. If CIOs measure the ability of their company's teams to complete tasks and projects faster while delivering satisfying customer results—instead of trying to measure returns based on the technology alone—they can prove the ROI of their investment in UC by turning their focus to collaboration as the goal.

Harness the Tip of the Information Iceberg

One of the biggest impacts of collaboration on the enterprise is the increased ability to find and use the right information at the right time. But, recent research findings differ. It would appear that there's either way too much information to make sense of, or that the ability to find what we need is severely limited—depending upon who you ask.

Unified Communications and Collaboration can help streamline the information flow. It's all about harnessing the silos you have now while working to make the boundaries to the information contained within them more fluid. Eliminating silos has been a battle cry for increasing informational access. But, perhaps that's too big an effort for many enterprises to tackle during this period of do more with less.

Consider a different perspective.

Last month's post, End Project Email Woes with Workspaces, discussed how to end the chaos of overflowing email which also serves to create silos of information for project teams. Increasing productivity—even amidst silos of information—becomes possible when the information critical to completing a project can be compiled within a workspace and made accessible to all project members, regardless of which silo or system sourced it.

One way to accomplish this is by enabling access to subject-matter experts via unified messaging, presence and video conferencing. This access allows your workers increased ability to actually find and gain access to the information they need. Once discovered the information can be added to the workspace for the entire team to use to do their jobs better...and faster.

The truth is that most companies produce silos of information created around areas of expertise. That's the nature of departmental work. You have your contact center silo, your solution area silos, your sales silo and marketing silo, to mention a few. Each of those areas is a concentrated niche of expertise that includes the subject matter experts who can facilitate access and establish context for how the information can best be applied to the project at hand.

The inherent problem with a "silo" is that it's limited by how data is accessed and used. Data usually has only one way in and one way out. Based on the demand for access to information that meets a workers' needs at a specific point in time, the better choice may be to improve collaboration across silo boundaries.

Perhaps harnessing the tip of the information iceberg via unified communications and collaboration is a more compelling and economically feasible approach than attempting to merge all of your silos together while struggling to maintain the integrity of the data simultaneously.

What do you think?

Unified Communications and Collaboration can help streamline the information flow. It's all about harnessing the silos you have now while working to make the boundaries to the information contained within them more fluid. Eliminating silos has been a battle cry for increasing informational access. But, perhaps that's too big an effort for many enterprises to tackle during this period of do more with less.

Consider a different perspective.

Last month's post, End Project Email Woes with Workspaces, discussed how to end the chaos of overflowing email which also serves to create silos of information for project teams. Increasing productivity—even amidst silos of information—becomes possible when the information critical to completing a project can be compiled within a workspace and made accessible to all project members, regardless of which silo or system sourced it.

One way to accomplish this is by enabling access to subject-matter experts via unified messaging, presence and video conferencing. This access allows your workers increased ability to actually find and gain access to the information they need. Once discovered the information can be added to the workspace for the entire team to use to do their jobs better...and faster.

The truth is that most companies produce silos of information created around areas of expertise. That's the nature of departmental work. You have your contact center silo, your solution area silos, your sales silo and marketing silo, to mention a few. Each of those areas is a concentrated niche of expertise that includes the subject matter experts who can facilitate access and establish context for how the information can best be applied to the project at hand.

The inherent problem with a "silo" is that it's limited by how data is accessed and used. Data usually has only one way in and one way out. Based on the demand for access to information that meets a workers' needs at a specific point in time, the better choice may be to improve collaboration across silo boundaries.

Perhaps harnessing the tip of the information iceberg via unified communications and collaboration is a more compelling and economically feasible approach than attempting to merge all of your silos together while struggling to maintain the integrity of the data simultaneously.

What do you think?

Communication Latency is Bad for Business

We've all used email and the phone extensively in our professional lives. Both can be used in a one-to-one or one-to-many setting. However, one limitation with only phone or email is that phone excludes data and email excludes voice.

When using only phone or email, response times are unreliable. If people are not available immediately, this can result in messages getting lost in overflowing inboxes or voice mail that can remain unanswered. Unified communications simplifies the growing complexity of communications by taking the guesswork out of the process.

Presence not only aids workers in discovering who's available when needed, but the best way to reach them. This reduces delays to decision making, improves your ability to hit project milestones on time and helps your company resolve more customer issues during the first call—to name but a few benefits that can boost your business results.

Speed and instant gratification seem to be the norm for communications today. This expectation has been aided by social media and Web 2.0 tools that enable seemingly instantaneous interactions. Your customers expect faster response times and so does your workforce.

Unified Communications is focused on reducing response times for work completion by enabling people to choose the most efficient and effective means of interaction for the task at hand. That means connecting the right people with the right information at the right time, regardless of location.

Considering that communications are likely the lifeblood of your business, eliminating communication latency should be a top priority. If you're looking for solid reasons to justify investing in advanced communication technology, here are a few issues that unified communications can help to correct:

• Number of customer issues requiring more than one call for resolution.
• Project delays based on the unavailability of subject matter experts.
• Amount of time executives are unavailable due to travel.
• Escalating product development costs.
• Lengthening sales cycles due to scheduling conflicts for sales meetings.

Enabling better connectivity between voice, data and applications impacts all of these at varying degrees. And the impacts are powerful enough to produce quite a return on investment.

End Project Email Woes with Workspaces

Nearly all of us work on teams or within project groups. Projects have a lot of moving parts that require team interaction to pull everything together, gain feedback, get questions answered, build consensus and meet deadlines.

Unfortunately, that usually means a lot of email messages that copy everyone involved--even if "everyone" doesn't need to be included on every communication thread. Even worse, chaos can follow when messages get deleted by mistake or overlooked in a buried inbox.

Overflowing inboxes are productivity inhibitors. If you've ever spent a day living in your inbox because messages just keep pouring in, you've surely thought there must be a better way.

There is. It's a collaborative workspace.

A collaborative workspace is a secure online environment for virtual team interface. You can also leverage your existing investments in unified communications by adding telephony capabilities to the workspace to easily manage voice communications through your computer when you're away from the office.

The beauty of a workspace is that it enables you to easily and securely include team members outside your company — suppliers, partners and customers, for example. Project team facilitation becomes easier when all members are working together with the same information at hand.

Consider a few benefits from putting an end to mass project emails:

• With the discussion forum questions and answers can be posted within the space, keeping all threads of information on record for simplified teamwork and collaboration. Imagine not having to search through dozens of emails to find an answer to a question asked three weeks ago.


• Documents can be checked out and worked on by team members, eliminating the question about which version is the latest and greatest — streamlining project management and creating a legacy record of the project details and deliverables.


• Know instantly who's available when you need them. Instant message for brief exchanges, escalate IM to a phone call or invite available team members to jump on a video conference to gain a fast consensus for a decision that keeps the project moving forward to meet milestone dates.


• Desktop Sharing enables team members to share work in progress with the team in real time, facilitating discussions that can help to modify the work as a group and eliminate the delays caused by forwarding documents via email for individual review and response.

In case you're still not convinced that workspaces are key drivers for increasing productivity and reducing the frustrations caused by fragmented collaboration, take a look at how a sales team reduced email dependence by 95% and what that shift produced for them.