The Seamless Enterprise

In a recent webinar, Nancee Ruzicka with Stratecast and I talked about the Seven Benefits of deploying UC. Unfortunately, time prohibited us from being able to answer all of the great questions we received during the session.

Following are a sampling of responses to some of the questions raised during the webinar. I’ll answer the rest in another post, so if you asked a question and don’t see it below, look for a response in my next posting. You can download the webinar here if you’d like to learn more.

How do you know if your organization is ready for UC?
If your organizational goals are focused on minimizing expenses, streamlining your network architecture, and increasing communication efficiency, UC may be the perfect solution. This is especially true if you have an increasingly mobile workforce to contend with. UC allows you to consolidate daily communication tools onto a single platform with a common user experience.

How do you determine what approach is best for your workforce?
The real opportunity in implementing a successful UC solution is based on leveraging your existing network investment and maximizing its full potential based on the advanced technologies that make UC possible. Do you understand how UC relates to your corporate network infrastructure? Do you have a legacy PBX environment? Do you heavily leverage collaboration software for your day-to-day communication tools? Once you understand how your network is being used, you can start to define how to approach UC for your company.

Can you start a UC project at a departmental level as opposed to an enterprise big bang?
Yes and no. A UC strategy must be regarded as an enterprise endeavor with a well defined long-term mission. But once the organization has defined its strategy, it should consider implementation of UC at the departmental level to generate valuable feedback from those early adopters.

What are the biggest typical objections to UC from top management, and how do you respond to them?
The most common objection to UC relates to how quickly an organization should react. UC is a compelling technology that is being considered by most enterprises; however, most organizations don’t fully understand the cost savings associated with UC, so they often ask why they should implement it now rather than wait a year or two. From our perspective – and our own experience – UC means significant cost savings while enabling productivity-enhancing mobility for employees. For Sprint, UC enabled 4,000 employees to efficiently work outside the traditional office, allowing elimination of more than a million square feet of office space, generating savings on power and other facility costs, and saving millions of commuting miles driven by employees each year.

Doesn’t UC pose single point of failure issues?
It depends on your deployment strategy. Sprint certainly recommends that customers evaluate ways to provide redundancy and failover within their UC solutions. That could mean, for example, deploying two separate IP PBXs in different locations with redundant trunks, or using a single IP PBX with a Sprint Mobile Integration handset as the “backup.” Ultimately, each enterprise must determine how much they are willing to invest in redundancy/failover versus managing the risk of more single points of failure.

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Tags: collaboration, green IT, Nancee Ruzicka, presence, Stratecast, telecommuting, Unified communications, unified messaging

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 7:36 am and is filed under Unified communications, collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.