Aspect found that its customers are implementing UC, either as pilots or early deployments, within areas or departments where voice is not mission critical, such as in IT, support, and human resources departments, as well as for distributed workforce members, such as field sales and field service personnel. As a result, in order for Aspect to deliver the maximum value to its customers, it had to develop a full suite of enterprise-focused services, including business case development, architecture and network design, implementation and integration, and, of course, UC enablement of key business processes. 

One of several areas where Aspect and UCStrategies are totally in sync is our joint view that UC is a journey. As such, Aspect suggests to organizations that they shouldn't necessarily look for specific benefits from individual UC components, but should view UC as a continuum of benefit opportunities that start with individual productivity capabilities, such as using presence, click to call, etc. (this sounds a lot like theUCStrategies’ UC-User approach). While these capabilities provide individual productivity savings, which are generally hard to aggregate on an enterprise basis, they do provide value over time. From there, companies can move to work group communications and collaboration, which is where they can really unlock many of the savings associated with UC, such as reducing travel and communication costs, or reducing expenditures on external conferencing bybringing it in-house. This provides significant, quantifiable benefits that can often be used in the early stages of an implementation to pay for the UC deployment.

The real benefits start to be unlocked when you embed UC into core business processes, which is sometimes referred to as communications enabled business processes (CEBP), or what the UCStrategies team calls UC-Business or UC-B. This includes optimizing a process that has many communication requirements or where there is human latency due to hand-offs between people and departments. Embedding UC in these processes can be a very powerful way to deliver clear benefits and significant ROI on an enterprise basis.

Whether or not a customer is starting with something as simple as unified messaging or a more complex solution, Aspect suggests that they design the solution with the end goal in mind. Rather than trying to design one-step at a time or implement one feature/application, plan for your destination. Aspect found that when organizations plan for the benefits they hope to achieve from a business standpoint, they're more apt to succeed.

Similarly, when deploying UC, it is more effective to analyze the roles of individuals and their requirements for various communications capabilities, as an organization is more inclined to deploy functionality that will be used in the appropriate manner to deliver the benefits throughout the enterprise. For example, an executive might have different communication needs and requirements than a remote worker, such as a sales person or a remote contact center agent. Carefully planning out what functionality those individuals need helps to ensure an optimal UC implementation. Aspect is also careful to explain to customers that any time you introduce new communication capabilities that enable the enterprise to accelerate business processes,invariably there will be cultural changes. People need to adapt to new ways of working in order to capture the benefits that UC makes possible.

I asked Aspect what advice they would give to companies currently considering how to incorporate UC into their business and IT strategies. They noted that first you need to engage in a comprehensive planning effort, as there is no substitute for effective planning, especially when dealing with a capability that can have such a pervasive, positive impact on the enterprise. Planning includes building a basic business strategy and a business case that takes into account architecture and network design, along with defining the roles and the ways in which people will use these communication tools.  Going through that planning process ensures a successful overall deployment while minimizing the amount of rework needed.

Aspect absolutely recommends “just trying it out.” Subsets of users can be up and running and trying out the functionality in less than two weeks. Organization can observe how key user groups leverage the tools and the kinds of benefits they achieve and use that as input into the overall planning process.

Finally, there's really no substitute at all for getting people to actually experience the capabilities and get excited about them. They will be terrific evangelists throughout the organization, which I believe will be a very, very important part of the UC journey.