The value of unified communications

As unified communication technologies mature, the focus is shifting from making a business case for UC to concrete and tangible deployment issues. To succeed, it is critical that business leaders, IT managers and planners understand where UC solutions offer value and how they improve competitiveness.

UC is designed to eliminate the barriers that have traditionally separated voice calls, e-mail, instant messaging and conferencing in all forms. Once these communication media are carried over a common IP network, it is possible to manage them from a single point and use them with common devices, enabling companies to transform key business processes with improved communication flows.

In addition to integrating communication channels -- both within the enterprise and with key constituents -- UC offers a way to integrate communication functions directly into business applications. Gartner calls this capability communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). By 2012, 80% of leading organizations will have adopted some form of CEBPs for competitive improvement.

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As unified communication technologies mature, the focus is shifting from making a business case for UC to concrete and tangible deployment issues. To succeed, it is critical that business leaders, IT managers and planners understand where UC solutions offer value and how they improve competitiveness.

UC is designed to eliminate the barriers that have traditionally separated voice calls, e-mail, instant messaging and conferencing in all forms. Once these communication media are carried over a common IP network, it is possible to manage them from a single point and use them with common devices, enabling companies to transform key business processes with improved communication flows.

In addition to integrating communication channels -- both within the enterprise and with key constituents -- UC offers a way to integrate communication functions directly into business applications. Gartner calls this capability communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). By 2012, 80% of leading organizations will have adopted some form of CEBPs for competitive improvement.

The largest single value in UC lies in its ability to reduce human latency within corporate processes and improve a business' ability to respond and be agile. Integrating communication functions directly into systems and applications individuals use is particularly effective at reducing human latency.

For instance, if CEBPs enable an engineer to fix a fault on a production line 30 minutes faster than would be possible otherwise, the benefit is the 30-minute savings and the value of restarting the line faster, which is likely to prevent a delay amounting to thousands of dollars per hour.

Gartner divides UC into three functional areas:

* Personal UC is geared toward the individual and includes smart phones, PDAs and other types of devices. These provide access to voice, instant messaging, presence information and business applications. Presence provides information about the availability and status of individuals or shared resources. This form of UC is geared toward supporting individual or personal productivity. For instance, rich presence (which shows the availability of individuals across multiple channels, such as instant messaging, phone, mobile phone and video) enables individuals to be more productive because it simplifies their work tasks. In addition, when applied in other ways, it can support collaboration work and enterprisewide objectives.

* Work-group unified communications is oriented toward supporting collaborative and team efforts. Examples of ways to improve performance include the use of presence to speed identification of an individual with the right skills to address a problem, the use of business rules to route or escalate communications, or the use of virtual meeting rooms to speed rapid-response teams.

* Enterprise UC integrates communications with enterprisewide and department-level applications, business processes and workflows. An example of this is credit-card authorization. When a bank receives a request for a credit authorization, an application reviews the request in real time. If the transaction is outside the credit-card holder's usual behavior, it is flagged as being at high risk of fraud. The system makes an outbound notification to the credit-card holder (phone, e-mail, Short Message Service). If the system succeeds in reaching the card holder, the individual is requested to confirm his identity. As a result, instead of rejecting a transaction from a valued customer, the bank can allow the transaction, improving the service and reducing its and the client's fraud exposure.