Unified Communication is not a simple summary of production tools

If the UC strategy is just to support production tools, it will not be able to realize its true value. The real value of UC lies in the integration of various employee production tools-Integration of telephone, email, instant messaging and social media based on a consistent recording system.

Moreover, when CIOs only regard UC as a summary of various tools, what they see is the future shielded by vendors. This perspective hinders the implementation of UC's long-term value and will eventually make CIOs suffer from it. For enterprises whose IT environment is composed of multiple manufacturers' products, the consequences will be even more serious.

Ken Agress, Research director at Gartner's UC, shares the same view with Rob Koplowitz, a senior analyst at Forrester Research's enterprise collaboration. However, the reality is always unsatisfactory. in the true sense, the UC strategy is rare-the integration of production tools and social networks based on enterprise record systems.

Tactical and strategic UC Solutions

Koplowitz believes that even those enterprises that intend to integrate UC tools with social collaboration platforms will encounter many specific problems during the promotion. This is partly due to the technical and cultural challenges faced by the deployment of the integrated communication environment-from adapting employees to acceptance of the Evaluation of business and technical value. "There have been a lot of talk about integration, and things are far more complicated than imagined ." Koplowitz.

Another factor hindering the UC strategy is the mainstream vendors. Compared to selling the overall solution Agress to CIOs, Agress is a big bucket of waste.) they are not very interested in integrating products from other vendors. Gartner's definition of UC is to add infrastructure functions to the application: "We define UC as an Environment Integrating Multiple communication modes, which makes interactions within the workflow possible ."

According to Agress, some second-tier vendors refuse to disclose the vendor's name) prefer to switch to open or standard-based integration methods. Of course, in order to provide more valuable services, these manufacturers must make great efforts to shift the market focus from hardware to software.

To achieve the expected success, UC needs to be integrated with internal applications and workflows, and extended to the mobile platform, remote staff, or public portal IT can support voice and instant messaging interactions in a relatively transparent manner ). At least, CIOs should try their best to force UC vendors to provide integrated functions and strictly control how to add these functions to real-time business applications.

The value of UC, social networks, and Enterprise Data Integration

CIOs often ignore the most fundamental point, that is, the value of the UC environment that integrates communication, applications, and social tools.

Forrester's Koplowitz provides an example of the significance of this integration: a commercial user finds that the information of a branch organization is deviated after analysis tools are used. Finding the root cause of the problem involves a broad network covered by social tools, and thus requires experts from all walks of life to diagnose the problem-for example, analyzing relevant reports or communicating through video conferences.

"These tools will be more effective in integration than in separation. If only an isolated tool is provided, it will lead to a barrier of knowledge, and employees will have to communicate through a large number of emails ." Koplowitz said. The next step is to integrate the enterprise record system, such as the compensation system.

This week, Yammer launched a new SAP integration solution. Koplowitz believes it is a lightweight multi-environment integration method. The Yammer solution allows users to learn about SAP upgrade messages on their social network platforms and provides links to original SAP records. "This is indeed the first step ." Koplowitz.

To ensure that such employee-optimized workflows can actually operate, enterprises must embed certain rules in the workflows to reduce risks, such as security, backup, and failure. Gartner's Agress illustrates this demand: for example, a financial service customer proposes to purchase a financial product when using instant messaging tools to query account balance. "This requires that the customer's needs be quickly converted from instant messages to valid phone interactions, and thus a transaction may be concluded ." Analyzed by Agress.

Agress tends to be a centralized service similar to ActiveDirectory, so as to achieve the transformation required in the above example in a unified manner and apply certain rules. However, few vendors are concerned about such centralized services.