Why Opportunity Discovery Methodology Works
My partner, Marty Parker, provided an overview of the successful methodology our firm, UniComm Consulting, has been using to find opportunities for unified communications and to plan self-funding deployments. Here are some additional suggestions for planning your migration to UC-based communications.
Our observation over the years is that many UC initiatives begin when a company considers upgrading an end-of-support PBX or when there is an infrastructure change to move to IP-based telephony. The latter is often part of a broader IP network upgrade that includes VoIP. Because of these origins, UC has become associated with a telephony replacement project. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that, but it runs the risk of pigeon-holing the arena for UC deployment, and masking where the best opportunities for business-impacting results may exist.
Our work has conclusively shown that while UC can certainly encompass telephony, it doesn’t necessarily start there, and in most cases certainly shouldn’t end there. In fact, some of the most interesting applications of UC don’t even rely on voice communication to bring the desired results.
We urge companies to look at their business processes, identify those that are communications-intensive, and then look for specific communications “hot spots,” breakdowns, and bottlenecks. This approach is very consistent with Lean Six Sigma concepts of identifying steps prone to errors, delay, and rework. This approach doesn’t just consider voice communications, and it looks for communications that should be happening, but aren’t, perhaps because there is no readily available channel given today’s communications capabilities. Most companies have established reasonable workarounds to communications impediments, so that some opportunities may not be readily apparent. That’s why focusing on the hotspot issues can be effective.
After enterprises have solved many intra-company communications, links to customers, suppliers, and business partners often remain problematic. A phone call may work, but often results in telephone tag; email may devolve into a series of time-delayed, clarifying exchanges; contact centers can answer a call, but will they have immediate access to expertise to get first call resolution? UC’s promise of federated presence and access through more effective channels can help. But new concepts, such as secure portals and creating communications links within applications can bring richer and more focused capabilities designed to solve specific communications challenges. These opportunities can be discovered through the methodology we recommend.
Equally important, our approach goes beyond looking at how people communicate with each other. Planners frequently consider how Joe’s team can more effectively interact with Mary’s, and so establish some UC-based collaboration capability. That’s fine. But bottom-line-impacting opportunities may be triggered by, for example, workflow process software recognizing that needed information is missing, and initiating access to the right expert. In the future, most communications are going to be software-assisted or even established automatically.
That’s one of the values that properly conceived UC can bring – opening up opportunities for communications where in-place technology doesn’t provide convenient access. It could be voice, IM, information exchange or retrieval, new kinds of collaboration capabilities, or ways to create links to customers, suppliers, and business partners, and many more variations and varieties. Communications capabilities are going to be embedded in all kinds of business application software. Ecosystems of integrators and applications developers are working now to use the standards-based linkages vendors are providing to open up these new communications capabilities and channels.
The value of the approach we recommend is that it identifies these innovative communications opportunities, whether people-to-people, people-to-information, or application-to-people. Please contact me (dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com) if we can provide more information.
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