By Stephen Pritchard
“Chief information officers are increasingly looking to streamline their companies’ communications, and to drive down both cost and complexity.
The last two decades have seen the number of communications options open to the enterprise grow rapidly. Fixed-line voice telephony has been joined by mobile phones and email. Instant messaging has gained a foothold in business, and companies are actively exploring other collaboration tools, from interactive whiteboards to high-definition video conferencing.
But while the proliferation of communications options has made work more flexible and often more effective, it has brought other problems to the enterprise. The cost of voice telephony minutes has fallen rapidly, for example, with a simple in-country voice call now a quarter or even a tenth of the price of 20 years ago. Nonetheless, the majority of CIOs would argue that the percentage of their budget spent on communications has actually risen.
For CIOs, the advances in communications technology have created a dilemma. Communications are cheaper, have more features and are generally more reliable than they were a generation ago. But because businesses use more communications channels today, many companies are finding that they are spending more on communications, not less.
The need to control this spending is moving higher up the corporate agenda. Enterprises might not have adopted a strategic approach to building out their communications systems.
Often technologies have been acquired for projects or by workgroups in a piecemeal way. Other developments have started as small-scale deployments to test the concept, but user demand has led to much wider take-up within the business. Even the mobile phone, now all but ubiquitous in most large organizations, was originally seen as a device only for the most senior tiers of management or for staff with particular tasks that required them to keep in touch on the road.
Moreover, such investments in communications might not have been planned for enterprise-wide deployment, leading to disconnected “islands” of technologies. And although small-scale projects can provide useful experience and a proof of concept prior to larger installations, often companies fail to carry out a rigorous analysis to establish whether there is a good enough return on such investments.
The consequences can be higher – and escalating – costs without the necessary proof that the technologies are repaying the money spent on them. But there is another, higher cost that large organizations often face: the burden of growing complexity on employees themselves.
The modern office worker will use several communications devices and multiple collaboration applications in the course of an ordinary day. These range from the fixed line phone, email and a cellular handset or PDA, to pagers, Internet telephony (VoIP) applications and softphones, and both internal and external instant messaging. It is by no means uncommon for today’s knowledge worker to use anywhere between five and seven communications channels, not including any task or job specific tools.
Clearly, there is a cost to companies in deploying and supporting these tools, especially if they are sourced from a variety of vendors. But the true cost to enterprises really lies in the way that complex communications can make employees less, rather than more, effective.
Research carried out by Siemens Enterprise Communications found that 94 percent of enterprise employees had to wait for the information they needed, yet 91 percent were frustrated by the amount of unwanted communications they received.
More than three-quarters of respondents (78 percent) found that inefficient communications meant that they failed to benefit fully from collaboration. Insignia Research found that employees spent three hours a week just planning future work sessions.
The result is lost time and less efficient processes, which in turn can lead to lost opportunities. The problem is worse still where staff are dealing with customers or the public.
A plethora of communications channels makes it hard, and sometimes impossible, for customers to work out how to contact key people in the business, whilst employees have to juggle the conflicting demands of different systems and multiple messages. Unsurprisingly, Siemens’ research found that communications limitations within organizations were a significant cause of customer complaints.
Fortunately, organizations can act to solve many of these problems by taking a more integrated approach.
According to Grace Tiscareño-Sato, Senior Global Marketing Manager, Unified Communications at Siemens, the issue is often one of “latency”- the need for staff to monitor and process information from multiple communications channels creates delays and often, missed messages.
Bringing together communications can eliminate many of these delays, as well as tackle increasingly complex architectures and rising costs. Ultimately, this will mean moving to a unified communications architecture.
CIOs might, though, be wary of investing yet more money and time in communications, especially if their existing experience has been of rising costs and less rather than more effective employees.
These barriers can be overcome by deploying unified communications strategically, at least in the first instance, says Tiscareño-Sato. “One theme is deploying the technology for specific sets of users. Pick groups where the need to remove latency is greatest; it is not about deploying 10,000 seats of instant messaging,” she says.
Organizations that have done this include Shimano American, the importers of cycling and fishing hardware, which is using unified communications for its sales and marketing teams, and the Newcastle NHS Trust in the UK. There, Siemens’ OpenScape unified communications is being used by the contact teams dealing with organ transplants, so that if a donor organ becomes available, everyone who needs to be alerted is contacted straight away.
However, even in more mundane businesses, moving to unified communications can eliminate many of the frustrations and costs of running a modern business. Obviously, organizations will need to make an up-front investment in order to buy and deploy the technology, and ensure that staff are trained to use it. But it is an investment that, in many cases, they cannot afford not to make.
“The appeal of unified communications will broaden,” says Tiscareño-Sato. “A department such as product development will see that sales has become so much more efficient, and will ask whether they can have the same technology too. It is about knowing how to collaborate, across different media.”
Tags: CIO, communications, reduce cost, siemens, UC, unified communications
