The UCStrategies Experts share their expertise in bylined articles, opinion pieces, blogs, and podcasts, to define unified communications, educate you about unified communications technologies, and help you make informed decisions about unified communications solutions.
UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies are implementing right now—and apply them to your situation.
This section offers learning tools to help you plan your unified communications implementation.
This section provides a practical, vendor-independent service to any Enterprise that is seeking the benefits of Unified Communications. How do you pull everything together to implement unified communications? Use the tools in this sequence to define unified communications for your business.
The Unified Communications industry changes daily. We keep track of it for you.
UCStrategies is an industry resource for unified communications enterprises, communications vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing unified communications arena.
A supplier of objective information on unified communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of unified communications since its inception.
Action planning for Unified Communications (UC) is actually very straightforward, though it is very different from planning for a new IP PBX.
For our clients, UniComm Consulting follows a 9-step process, illustrated as:
As you can see, the planning process starts with learning about the market (which you're doing here, for example) and with a review of your organization's strategy to determine which areas deserve the most attention. The next three steps are an examination of the value chain activites in these important areas. You can read more about how to do that in the article Top UC Apps Are Now Apparent. Essentially, you are looking for those processes with significant communications elements in them and trying to find where those communications are not working well today (the "hot spots") or could be dramatically improved with new Unified Communications tools.
Once you have found the problems, step 6 uses a combination of flowcharting, brainstorming, business process analysis, and case study or vendor reference information to suggest improvements to the business process using UC technologies. Step 7 then uses a scoring technique to prioritize those UC apps that have the highest potential payoff with a low or appropriate level of risk.
Then, in step 8, you look at the available products from vendors to find the best tools for the solutions that were designed in step 6 and that are consistent with your strategy in step 2. Note that this phase comes late in the cycle, not at the begining, since you can't pick the best technologies without knowing which problems you are trying to solve.
Lastly, in step 9, you create a UC implementation plan. Here's a Sample UC Plan TOC (Table of Contents) for the UC implementation plan.
The entire Planning Process is available as a two-day Telecom+UC Training workshop, "Planning and Implementing Unified Communications."
We welcome questions and discussion about this topic. Please send an e-mail message to MParker@UCStrategies.com.
UC Resources Section To add content or links to UC Resources contact:Organized and Managed by mparker@UCStrategies.com Text (c) 2010 M. F. Parker. Content (c) as indicated.