Organisations are under increasing pressure to improve employee productivity and reduce costs. In turn, senior executives have identified a need to use information technology more aggressively to achieve these goals, according to new research from Dimension Data.
Dimension Data commissioned Datamonitor to conduct the survey, which surveyed 390 IT managers and 524 end-users across 13 countries in the United States, Asia Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The research released today indicates that the top three objectives for organisations' unified communication investment strategies for 2007 and beyond are to raise productivity, increase customer satisfaction and cut costs.
Unified communications enables richer interaction by integrating most forms of communication (voice, e-mail, fax, instant messaging and video) through a single interface.
Rob Lopez, Managing Director, Solutions at Dimension Data, says: "Productivity remains a crucial driver behind organisations' communications strategies. As such, flexi-working, supported by technologies including e-mail, mobile telephony and instant messaging and presence information, can play a significant role in increasing employee productivity."
The research findings support this trend, and show that organisations' motivation for offering flexible working focus on increasing employee productivity (41%), employee retention (13%), and compliance with existing/future work-home initiatives (12%).
Statistics by country reflect that in most countries in the Middle East and Africa, emphasis is on employee productivity. In European countries, there is a focus on both employee productivity and compliance, while the United States and Asia focus on employee productivity and retention.
Lopez continues: "Employees are under no illusion that organisations are seeking to deploy ubiquitous communication tools and flexi-work initiatives to increase their productivity. Nevertheless, they are not overly cynical and adopt flexi-work readily as a result of the perceived personal gain. The high levels of technology adoption also indicate that the functionality these tools bring is seen as beneficial," he adds and points out that the larger the company, the more likely it will support flexible working.
According to the survey, 57% of the organisations interviewed offer flexible working with active IT support, 15% offer flexible working with no IT support, and 29% do not offer flexible working. Mobile telephony and VPN are the most widely available tools for flexi-work. There is scope to give flexi-workers more technologies such as instant messaging to improve their productivity.
"To successfully roll out flexi-work, organisations need to offer support. This requires additional resources and management capability of the infrastructure, as well as end-user education around the best way to securely use these technologies," Lopez concludes.
Other key findings in the Dimension Data survey include: unified communications is a vibrant and developing market; security is a concern rather than an issue; unified communications technologies are more likely to be outsourced or externally managed than other technologies; and unified communications mindshares are dominated by alpha brands within each market.
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Dimension Data (LSE:DDT), a specialist IT services and solution provider, helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data applies its expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage and contact centre technologies and its unique skills in consulting, integration and managed services to create customised client solutions.