It's certainly common for IT departments to experience some infighting among groups or individuals who want to own control of a new project or technology direction.

We saw it way back when client-server computing emerged, in the early days of the Internet, and we’ve seen it more recently with IP telephony. But where we are not seeing it is with unified communications.

Have IT teams learned from past mistakes? Have they reassessed the value of harmonious work environments?

In some cases, yes. But what’s more likely to be the case is that no single person or department has the background, experience, or perspective to develop an all-encompassing, successful unified communications strategy.

Early indicators are that the network or telecom departments are leading efforts surrounding unified communications - primarily because companies view IP telephony or voice/unified messaging as their first foray into unified communications. But, they also recognize that unified communications requires the expertise of applications development, desktop support, security, and indeed, business units who will use these technologies to improve employee productivity, cut costs, or increase revenue.

As a result, numerous organizations - ranging from small or midsize companies with a dozen or so branch locations to global enterprises with several thousand locations - have assembled cross-functional teams to make recommendations and/or decisions on what components of unified communications to deploy, when, and why.

For a unified communications strategy to be successful in a distributed enterprise, it’s vital to include the business units. I’ve talked to many IT executives about including business-unit leaders for other technology deployments, and some have responded with, “Easier said than done. The head of sales doesn’t care what network technology we implement, or whether we switch from TDM to IP telephony.”

With unified communications, though, that’s not the case. Business units often are leading the charge for capabilities such as mobility extension for key applications (think CRM or inventory systems linked to handheld devices), desktop videoconferencing (think marketing departments showing new marketing collateral to key remote workers for their input), or instant messaging (think contact-center agents helping multiple customers at once, while having their call history displayed automatically).

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.