One of the features of today’s global economy is the increasing importance of horizontal, collaborative relationships between employees, customers and business partners. The ability to communicate and collaborate with people inside and outside the business is becoming a key business differentiator.
This ability depends, of course, on an organisation’s IT and communications strategy, and this is the main driver for Unified Communications and Collaboration, or UCC. What is UCC? It describes a way to combine today’s complex mix of different communication and collaboration technologies into a single strategy that simplifies the user experience, promotes collaboration between key stakeholders in an organisation, and provides a more controllable, valuable and cost-effective communications environment.
Used effectively, UCC can add value to a range of core business processes and help organisations improve operational efficiency, and the bottom line. To understand why, we first have to examine today’s communication and collaboration environment. Unified Communications and Collaboration is designed to overcome a number of challenges facing all large organisations today. These are just a few:
- Increasing complexity: communication channels are increasing in number and in sophistication. Business depends on email, mobile calls, instant messaging and SMS as well as traditional fixed line, postal and fax communications. This increases the pressure on organisations and their users who have to manage these channels and technologies.
- The need to respond instantly: we now expect instant access and responses to every communication activity: we have this expectation of the people we work with, and they in turn expect the same from us. We’re losing the ability to effectively manage an increasingly complex mix of real-time communication activities. This increases the burden on employees and often has a negative effect on our personal lives, too.
- Reduced productivity: the pressure to respond immediately to the latest text, email or phone call has a significant impact on productivity. Employees are often left with little choice but to drop what they’re doing and take the call, read the email or reply to the text. With no way to prioritise communications, and with increasing complexity overall, users are distracted from their core activities.
- Increasing communication costs: a common response to this complex communications environment is to rely on mobile devices for almost all communication activities – even when people are in the office. It’s simpler, but mobile communication tends to be more expensive and is often divorced from an organisation’s existing investment in communication networks.
- Compliance: with multiple, multiplying communication channels, organisations face an enormous challenge in tracking, storing, retrieving and distributing the content of all their communication activities. With a complex infrastructure and complex communication activities, compliance is significantly more difficult.
Bringing it all together with UCC
Unified Communications and Collaboration aims to help organisations to reap the benefits of today’s sophisticated, multi-functional communications technology without having to deal with the complexity. The goal is to provide a single multimedia application suite that works seamlessly with enterprise applications, in order to support real-time and ‘right-time’ business processes.
Key features of UCC are the ability to manage voice and data across a single, converged network; the convergence of wide-area, local-area and remote access networks; the ability to manage security regardless of the device or channel being used; and presence technology, which ensures that a user’s availability is automatically updated to facilitate easier contact.
Starting your UCC journey
The promise of UCC is a simple, seamless, automated and highly controlled communications environment that encourages collaborative working and promotes business agility. No wonder, then, that Forrester Research has predicted that integrated communications will become the new standard for effective business communication within the next five to six years. According to Forrester, up to 33% of the Global 2,000 firms are likely to complete at least a partial integrated communications roll-out within this time frame*.
While there is no doubt that the journey towards fully unified communications and collaboration will be a long one, is it a journey you can afford not to start now? BT has published a new white paper that examines the drivers, components and benefits of UCC in detail. You can download your free copy here.
* Unified Synchronized Communications Arrives, Forrester Research, 2004
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