To fully meet the challenges that organisations face when implementing unified communications (UC), it is important that businesses view their change programmes holistically, and ensure that the best UC projects have executive sponsorship beyond the IT department.
So says Paul Clark, Plantronics' VP of UK, Ireland and sub-Saharan Africa, who points out that for many organisations, UC is part of a wider change within the business to more flexible and agile working.
"The technology is ready for prime time, and many businesses are already adopting it, so the main challenges are actually organisational ones. The biggest issue is for business, as a whole, to realise the benefits that UC can bring and to appropriately scope out how these can be captured for the benefits of the business and the individual," he explains.
According to Clark, UC brings together the data world as well as the telephony world like never before, where previously IT and telephony were seen as separate fiefdoms within businesses.
However, he notes that over the last few years, this is becoming less of an issue - with the IT and telecoms teams being part of the same departments. "Once the UC project is implemented, the remaining challenge is user adoption of the available technology."
Describing the latest trends in the UC market, Clark says over the past 12 months, there has been a marked increase in companies' appreciation that UC is a necessary part of evolving their businesses.
"The sovereign debt crisis affecting many countries has sharpened minds onto cost savings, improving business efficiencies and improving business agility. UC was initially being implemented predominantly by large multinational companies with distributed R&D functions or large worldwide workforces like pharmaceutical or petrochemical companies.
"Now I am seeing it being implemented by a much broader spectrum of companies, including public sector bodies, like health authorities, local governments and education authorities, across all countries. The big focus today is on real cost savings and introducing new levels of business agility."
Clark also believes that the biggest contributing factor to the success of a UC project is user adoption. He notes that there is little point in spending significant organisational resources to implement UC if nothing changes in staff's actions and behaviours.
"A good quality headset, or audio endpoint, appropriate to the user makes a significant contribution to user adoption because it can make using the technology so much more intuitive and simple.
"Imagine, for example, that you have a mobile user who, in a UC environment, uses both his mobile phone and now his laptop to make and receive calls. Plantronics offers a single headset solution that will allow that user to take or make calls on either device and switch between them seamlessly. We know, from UC projects Plantronics have been involved in, that a good quality headset can help enhance adoption."
He adds that another element to consider in recouping the ROI for a UC project is staff training. According to Clark, it is important for staff to have the skills and knowledge on the new capabilities available to them from their UC solution.
He explains that at Plantronics, they have used a third-party to train staff on the use of the technology, which significantly accelerated the savings they had built into their business case for conference call bridging, for example.
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