Presidio Blog

Is the Goal of UC Business Collaboration or Communication?

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. Make the goal  a matter of increasing collaboration with the enablement of rich communications as the means to support that outcome.

The measurement of returns is a key concern with any IT investment. The most noteworthy ROI publicly documented via UC is a reduction in travel created by video conferencing and telepresence. In fact, that has been a driving force for much of the adoption of UC to date. In order for CIOs to move from considering an increase of their investments in UC to taking action, they need to see tangible avenues for measuring ROI.

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. 

As a result, companies need to address hindrances to productivity such as:

• A lack of access to information and colleagues.


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


• Limited participation by geographically dispersed or traveling team members.

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.

Delayed Communications Stall Business Objectives

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.

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.

Reduce Email Dependency with Workspaces

The nature of work today usually means being a member of at least one project team--often more than one.  Working in conjunction with a number of people means more interaction is necessary to pull everything together.

Teams collaborate in order to:

• solicit feedback
• get questions answered
• build consensus 
• finalize deliverables
• 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 cluttered 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.

Collaboration ROI Seen in Functional Areas

Unified communications is often touted as delivering ROI through reduced travel expenses. But, the returns on collaboration aren’t as simple as traditional ROI measurements tied to dollars and cents. Research is finding that the benefits show up in unexpected ways related to improvements tied to functional areas.

Frost and Sullivan conducted a study together with Cisco and Verizon to discern the returns on collaboration seen by companies who have deployed varying degrees of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C). Their research into returns by functional area found that interactions involving higher numbers of people produced the highest levels of returns (i.e., one to many and many to many).

But, what's really compelling is that Frost and Sullivan's research study found that even Basic Collaborators identify an almost 2.8 return on their UC&C investment. The more progressive that collaboration deployments become, the higher the return with those at the most advanced levels seeing a return of six times on their investment.

Here's a snapshot of the differing levels of collaboration the study found:

Source: Frost and Sullivan

The point to consider is that every level of UC&C deployments are found to deliver ROI. So, start now and roll out additional tools incrementally to generate those progressive levels of improvements that payoff with quantifiable performance improvements.

Download the Frost and Sullivan Report and see how Biesse America is realizing a $15,000 to $18,000 monthly ROI from their UC&C deployment over on Search VoIP

Unified communications is often touted as delivering ROI through reduced travel expenses. But, the returns on collaboration aren’t as simple as traditional ROI measurements tied to dollars and cents. Research is finding that the benefits show up in unexpected ways related to improvements tied to functional areas.

Frost and Sullivan conducted a study together with Cisco and Verizon to discern the returns on collaboration seen by companies who have deployed varying degrees of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C). Their research into returns by functional area found that interactions involving higher numbers of people produced the highest levels of returns (i.e., one to many and many to many).

But, what's really compelling is that Frost and Sullivan's research study found that even Basic Collaborators identify an almost 2.8 return on their UC&C investment. The more progressive that collaboration deployments become, the higher the return with those at the most advanced levels seeing a return of six times on their investment.

Here's a snapshot of the differing levels of collaboration the study found:

Source: Frost and Sullivan

The point to consider is that every level of UC&C deployments are found to deliver ROI. So, start now and roll out additional tools incrementally to generate those progressive levels of improvements that payoff with quantifiable performance improvements.

Download the Frost and Sullivan Report and see how Biesse America is realizing a $15,000 to $18,000 monthly ROI from their UC&C deployment over on Search VoIP

Collaboration Unleashes Knowledge Assets

By our very nature, we're social animals.  Collaboration via Unified Communications, video and mobility solutions are enabling the "new normal" for doing business. Just look at how fast social networking and Web 2.0 have become part of our daily experiences. The ability to meet “virtually” and exchange ideas, with people we'd never have the opportunity to otherwise communicate with, has changed our perceptions and increased our desire to interact whenever we decide to participate.

These new solutions let our companies keep pace. We can no longer compete effectively if we're unable to locate and use our knowledge assets in innovative ways. Work is not a solitary endeavor. Ideas expressed in a team setting converge and generate new concepts not possible without harnessing a variety of perspectives.

Business success is driven by how information is shared and used. By providing employees with the right information to make better decisions with less hassle and at the right time, the more opportunities for success exist. The crux of the matter is that this information is not always located on your servers or within your systems. The critical information you need to access and share often resides with your staff, partners and even your customers.

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines because the expertise we need is across town or in a different time zone. People are the secret sauce for business execution. This said, processes and applications are the supporting cast that helps people bring our businesses to life in service of our markets.

Collaboration is people working together to achieve a common goal. Unified Communications is the technology that enables that goal achievement - anytime, anywhere - which is the "new normal" businesses must achieve to find success.

A recent study conducted by Cisco found that out of 800 people asked, 75% say that work practices today are more collaborative than they were two years ago.  Read about what else the group said about how they leverage technology for their collaborative needs…Get a copy of the report and start considering how you can improve the way you enable people to work together to drive your company's success.

3 Pay Offs from Collaboration Technology

For collaboration technology to gain executive buy-in, the value for the business has to be clear. Collaboration has come a long way in the past few years, enabling company's to transform the ways their people learn and work together. Done well, your company will see noticeable impact to performance, customer satisfaction and project completion.

This excerpt from a recent blog post by analyst Blair Pleasant brings the value point home:

"'Talking heads' as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.

For collaboration technology to gain executive buy-in, the value for the business has to be clear. Collaboration has come a long way in the past few years, enabling company's to transform the ways their people learn and work together. Done well, your company will see noticeable impact to performance, customer satisfaction and project completion.

This excerpt from a recent blog post by analyst Blair Pleasant brings the value point home:

"'Talking heads' as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.

For collaboration technology to gain executive buy-in, the value for the business has to be clear. Collaboration has come a long way in the past few years, enabling company's to transform the ways their people learn and work together. Done well, your company will see noticeable impact to performance, customer satisfaction and project completion.

This excerpt from a recent blog post by analyst Blair Pleasant brings the value point home:

"'Talking heads' as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.

See Collaborative Technology in Action

This video presents a fun take on how real-time collaboration can impact customer service relationships. This futuristic scenario shows how it's possible to transform the way business can get done better and more efficiently behind the scenes. Actually, the reality isn't that far off...

Isn't it interesting that by making it simple for teams and employees to connect—anytime, anywhere—you can transform how your customers experience your complex products? Although I'm still not sure I'm ready to hear Scrappy talk to me in English...are you?

CIO Magazine Survey on Unified Communications

If you've been on the fence about unified communications, this survey might help convince you that collaboration technology delivers advantages you can't afford to pass up. CIO Magizine conducted an exclusive survey of 413 CIO.com visitors involved in technology purchases at their organizations in July 2009.

The survey asked respondents to answer a variety of questions about the use of unified communcations, including determining factors for purchase, benefits received and future plans around use of the advanced technology.

The survey results for the 32% of respondents currently using UC include:

Benefits considered to have the greatest impact:

• Faster productivity 64%
• Faster response time and delivery of information 50%
• Reduced travel expenses 40%
• Improved customer service 31.6%

It's interesting to note that the result we hear about the most often, reduced travel expense, was in 3rd place. And the argument for Green IT was only considered a great benefit by 8.3%.

The functionality on the IT radar for the next 12 months includes:

• Cellular/Wi-Fi Integration 31.7%
• Telepresence technology 26.6%
• Desktop videoconferencing 25.4%

Given the increasing mobility and geographic disparity of project teams, those seem to be choices that will continue to increase productivity for companies who implement the advanced technology.

To see all of the results of the survey, you may download a PDF copy here.

Removing Geographic Limitations from Face-to-Face Communications

Each of us spends more time online interacting with people on a variety of platforms – social networking, webinars, virtual conferencing — about numerous topics of interest. We respond in real time and expect the same from others. In the work place, employees have come to expect the same experiences in their work environments and the tools that facilitate how they do their jobs.

The ways in which we utilize digital social and community platforms has removed the necessity for us to be face-to-face with someone for conversations. We’re becoming adept at texting. We’ve all come to rely on email and document attachments. This said, there are some times when the nuances of language and the body language in response to conversations is the key to getting the outcomes that pull a project back on track or cement a relationship with a customer into place.

To keep working at the pace our businesses require, we need the instant gratification of advanced communication technology to help us out.

From being able to find the people we need to interact with—along with the best way to contact them in real time—to the ability to escalate the method of communication to get clarity without losing the thread, a technology assist can become a productivity boost.

Imagine this scenario:

• You need answers to questions a customer in Atlanta raised about project execution in their proposal.


• You locate the expert you need in Dallas and see they’re available by Instant Message.


• After a brief exchange, you need to discuss the rewording of a clause in the proposal.


• With one click you escalate the Instant Message session to a web conference.


• You can now see each other on video as well as see the document in the web browser and work together to edit it in real time.


• As you hang up, you save the updated proposal and call your customer. You pop into a web conference and walk her through the updated change, getting her agreement to move forward.

If you tried to accomplish this through standard methods—like sending email or chasing people via voicemail—how much longer would it take to get the same outcome?

How much more value do you think your customers will assign to your efforts given the personalization and speed of your responsiveness via collaborative technology?

Can you share instances where you've used collaborative technology to advance a project or close a deal?