Three secrets of UC success: culture, choice and the cloud.

Transcription

1 WHITEPAPER Three secrets of UC success: Beyond expectation.

2 Introduction. Unified Communications (UC) brings together multiple real-time and offline communication tools such as telephony, and instant messaging plus a range of capabilities presence and click-to-call with video conferencing - into single integrated solutions. There are so many elements to implementing a successful unified communications solution identifying the right solution, the right features and the deployment and integration of multiple technologies across your locations, users and devices. When done correctly, unified communications can make life a lot simpler (and more productive) for your business and your people. Despite this, it can be complex to deploy, and ensuring your organisation is well prepared for UC and getting the most out of your current UC solution can make or break it. Here we highlight three key elements beyond the usual technical challenges to keep in mind to ensure the success of UC in your workplace. 1. Channel choice is critical. 2. Your business is on a UC journey but are your people? 3. Should you put your UC in the cloud? 1. Communications choice. You need to arm your people with the right tools for the tasks they are trying to accomplish choice is the key to good communications. Often technology innovation happens under the hood. Arguably the change from discreet TDM to converged IP telephony was like that. Most people really didn t see any change other than a slight difference in the phone cable. But some changes, like word processing and then the , transformed the way things are done completely. The office environment of the late 1970s had become unrecognisable by the 1990s. What kind of change is communications undergoing today? Let s consider today s communications environment. For a typical knowledge worker, a good day is often a reflection of their success in communicating with colleagues, partners and customers using the various channels and tools that UC offers. On a good day, you make contact with people quickly and get your points across, reach an understanding and agree a way forward. On a bad day, you re frustrated by not getting hold of the right people, or you find it s a nightmare to get people together to agree the way forward on a given project or problem. Today s world is far more ad hoc and quicker paced. At the start of the day most people will have an idea of what they want to work on - but they likely couldn t predict who they ll need to communicate with by close of play or how they will communicate. Spurred by an unexpected fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk

3 request in an , an error in a purchase, a support call or simply their own inspiration - the challenge becomes getting hold of people quickly, using the most appropriate method, to exchange ideas, information or points of view. 41% of enterprises are planning to boost their investment in collaboration tools in 2016, with the fastest growth in areas like enterprise social networking, presence and IM tools. Enterprise Communications in 2016 Survey', Azzurri Communications, December The difference between good or poor communications is often caused by channel choice. Ultimately there is no right way to communicate - but using the wrong method can inhibit understanding, takes more time and ultimately affects the eventual resolution. It may be that a phone call will suffice, or you may need to share or collaborate on a presentation, or use video to see people s reactions. Good communication propels things forward. Poor communication holds things back. A three day delay in getting hold of someone equates to a three day delay in resolving an issue. That kind of delay can be critical in today s fast paced environment. Communications is important and yet many organisations are taking it for granted. They see no need to move from their current systems or set up, which just get the job done. UC should deliver seamless, ad hoc communications to your people. But change is here! The ability to have an ad hoc video call, so that you can better engage with the person you re speaking to. The ability to respond to an by bringing a number of people into a chat session, then seamlessly upgrade to a voice or video conference and share information in a presentation through screen sharing. Getting notified as soon as someone becomes available. Being shown the best way to contact someone at any point or letting others know how to contact you. All of these are now easily available as standard functionality within modern UC systems not just between colleagues but between organisations and across continents! It s more than simply making multiple communication modes available, it s about using presence to indicate the most appropriate communication modes at a given moment, by focusing on the people who are trying to communicate and highlighting their readiness and ability to communicate. Why are enterprises embracing UC? Info. The predominant view of UK enterprises (250+ employees) is that their current telephony is not fit-for-purpose, hence a dramatic proportion (48% of enterprises surveyed*) are intending to change it in the next 12 months during The key reasons given for this change include: *'Enterprise Communications in 2016 Survey', Redshift Research and Azzurri Communications, published December Increase employment productivity 55% Employee demand for modernisation 55% Takes up too much IT management time 40% Current approach being-under adopted 35% Our current system is too inflexible 20% To reduce running costs 10% fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk

4 2. Culture change. Your business is on a UC journey - but are your staff following? The key battleground in the UC market today is not around features or functionality, but ease of use. For example, today most modern phone systems offer a host of features, but how many of your staff actually know how to use any of them beyond making a call or accessing their voic ; let alone do so on a regular basis? When most users cannot use their telephone effectively, the result is that none of the expected productivity or efficiency benefits are achieved. This is one of the essential challenges of a successful UC deployment. But, no matter how much the manufacturers focus on user experience design, these are still complex applications with many capabilities. Even your most sophisticated users will only use the features they already know and probably won t investigate the features they don t. The result for many companies is that their people use this sophisticated (and often expensive!) UC system the same way they used the telephone system they make and take calls in the office or maybe send a few IMs. For UC to truly deliver the promised benefits - better productivity, more agile workforces, improved collaboration and thus lower costs - users have to actually use it. And when they do, they need to enjoy a good experience to ensure they keep coming back to it. Are your users using UC? The UK is full of UC implementation projects that achieved all their technical goals, but failed to deliver the desired business benefits in terms of more productive and efficient people. But there are many other instances where threatening to take away the UC system would result in a full-scale revolt amongst the workforce. So what s the difference between the two approaches? One of the biggest barriers to adoption for any new technology in the workplace is your employees confidence in their own skills and knowledge. Give them the tools (and education) to get the most from your unified communications solution and they are far more likely to embrace it. *'Enterprise Communications in 2016 Survey', Redshift Research and Azzurri Communications, published December So if you want to realise the benefits of UC, then user training, cheat sheets, internal peer-support user groups and other steps like this to properly support your deployment are as important as ensuring a successful technical implementation. Then you ll reap the rewards that UC promises. Uptake of collaboration tools is high, as is employee use! Info. In line with the growth of the Digital Workplace, uptake of collaboration tools amongst UK enterprises is high (93% have deployed at least one tool; 65% have deployed more than one). Happily, these are not empty investments employee adoption is high, with almost all the collaboration tools being used at least weekly and many used daily. fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk

5 Tips for a successful UC deployment: Don t just treat it as a technology deployment if you don t carry the users with you, or they aren t confident on how it works, they won t use the system to its full potential, and you won t realise the benefits you hoped for. Training, how to videos, internal evangelists and other methods for engaging and educating your staff should be an essential element of your planning. Don t just assume your network will perform well transmitting video check it! If users get a poor experience because the network is not up to scratch, they will blame the UC implementation and won t use it. Don t assume that your existing wireless network will work with voice Wi-Fi that was designed for a few executives several years ago may not cut it when everyone tries to talk using a laptop. Don t skimp on peripherals using high-quality headsets with soft-phones is essential for a good user experience. The built-in microphone on a laptop is almost always no good. 3. The cloud question. On-premise vs cloud which is right for your UC? When it comes to their unified communications, enterprises are battling both technological and vendor confusion. The rise of Microsoft s Skype for Business has led to a huge disruption of the status quo and the concept of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is gaining increasing traction as a viable alternative to traditional models. There has also been a shift within organisations, where the IT department is increasingly becoming a service organisation internally, treating employees as customers and using technology to allow individuals to achieve their goals of increased efficiency, collaboration and productivity through a transformational change of the business. As a result, IT departments are beginning to realise that often it s cheaper to outsource basic communication services so that they can focus on transformational business change. This is true with Unified Communications (UC) in particular. But it s not an easy step. When deciding whether to manage their own systems on-premise, or subscribe to a cloud or hosted managed service, the question organisations need to ask is: What is the business benefit from us owning and managing this system ourselves? The changing role of on-premise. On-premise software is installed and runs on computers on the premises of the organisation, rather than at a remote facility. Many companies also have on-premise software that is managed in-house. Although the company may contract with a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) for some aspects of their UC, in the end the company is responsible for its own system. There are times when having an on-premise service is absolutely critical such as on a hospital campus where it is imperative to have a telephony service on site. But while UC is part of an essential business transformation designed to improve customer relationships, productivity, fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk

6 The share of unifi ed communications deployed in the cloud is set to rise from 6% in 2015, to 28% in Enterprise Communications in 2016 Survey', Azzurri Communications, December efficiency and agility, it s rarely a competitive differentiator within a company. If there is a clear case for competitive differentiation, essential availability, security risks or even cost reductions, then on-premise can be the way to go. However, with the range of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offerings available today an on-premise model is no longer the default option. More fl exibility, less risk. Meanwhile pure cloud services are often still like UC on-premise - offering little to no real flexibility or personalisation capabilities. This leaves IT departments forced to tailor their businesses to the solution they have purchased - but a managed cloud service or UCaaS solution CAN be tailored to an individual organisation to suit their needs and preferences. Putting your UC in the cloud as part of a managed service can offload risk and pass on the responsibility for the following key areas to the service provider: No more tricky vendor and technology decisions: By adopting a UCaaS approach you can mitigate the risk associated with vendors and technology because you ve contracted a provider to meet a set of end user features within an SLA. This means any change in the market such as a vendor exiting or end-of-life product becomes the responsibility of the CSP and you aren t locked into any specific technology paths. Easier installation and migration: You can smoothly transition to the new service, letting the service provider handle it, mitigating any risks involved in migrating users and ensure a swifter ROI. With the benefit of providing a standard cloud platform, provisioning a new company on existing equipment designed for the task is faster, more efficient and more reliable than building a new environment. Greater service assurance: Providing a base UC platform to all customers means a provider can use a number of different systems to monitor performance and maintain as close to 100 per cent availability as possible. System maintenance is both scheduled and reactive - managing systems releases as they are available and tested, but also able to react quickly to any vendor alerts of vulnerability. Managing expenditure and costs: Because you are paying for a service at an agreed cost, any changes in vendor, technology or products remain the service provider s liability. More secure and compliant: The risk associated with malicious or accidental attacks on the service can be handled as part of the SLA. Equipping workers with the right UC tools will drive efficiency, collaboration and productivity. However, UC on-premise and fixed cloud services do not offer the flexibility needed to support the UC requirements of businesses today. To fully reap the benefits of UC it is hard to look beyond a cloud managed service for businesses today. UC as a Service leaves the commodities such as internet connectivity and IP systems to a skilled CSP who can be a better and cheaper option. The mature offerings of today remove almost all the earlier barriers to adoption: Organisations can still run their own individual instances, keeping their networks protected and secure. Integration with directory services, business applications and traditional IP-PBX and video fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk

7 conferencing services are readily available. The cost of delivering high quality, highly available networking has come down considerably. With these key elements covered by a trusted partner, this leaves the IT department free to focus on enabling transformational business change. Conclusion. Technology, whether it s the devices, software, integration or connectivity, has already immeasurably changed how we work and that change will continue apace. Organisations that rely on knowledge workers to drive business forward need to make sure that their unified communication technologies (and how they deploy them) don t leave them behind! fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk

8 About Azzurri Communications. Azzurri Communications is transforming UK organisations through technology and managed services. Since 2000, Azzurri has helped its customers to become faster, more connected and more competitive by delivering unrivalled expertise and award-winning services. Azzurri s flexible services and integrated solutions include unified communications, enterprise mobility and flexible working, networks, contact centres and document solutions. Today, Azzurri is focused on delivering transformational solutions for mid-market private enterprise and public sector organisations. Azzurri helps securely connect organisations with their people and their customers, in the office, on the move and in the cloud. Beyond expectation. fi ndoutmore@azzu.co.uk