This week I was asked to present a quick segment to a group of about 50 customers and partners, the topic being “Best Practices,” without much definition or context. The majority of the customer participants were CIO/CTO or other senior decision-making managers, so a presentation on technical best practices was definitely out of the question. On top of that I only had about 30 minutes, so my goal was to present concepts to help these customers as they moved along the path of making decisions about their unified communications goals.
With that context, I thought I’d share the material that I presented in case others find it informative. There’s not a ton to it in terms of text content – it’s really meant to spur thoughts and conversation, which it definitely did. If I had a longer time slot I would definitely expand on a number of these areas and add dedicated sections to explore concepts like voice and video in more depth.
Planning for Unified Communications – A Perspective on Best Practices
© Mike Stacy 2010, All Rights Reserved
Define the Vision
UC has the capability to encompass or integrate with virtually every aspect of your user’s daily experience – plan for it
- Understand the business value of a complete, long term solution and identify that as the target state
- Plan for the unknown – some capabilities/integration points with significant ROI may not exist today or will be easier/cheaper in the future
- Break the target state down into smaller projects and manage appropriately
- Be aware of the potential impact on the IT organization – changes may be in order as part of the project plan
User Experience is King
The most beneficial result of a successful UC deployment is the increase in collaboration as a result of new user behavior
- Understand the impacts to users’ workflows, desktop experience, etc. as each aspect of a UC strategy is deployed
- Involve “champion” users in the pilot and feedback groups so that their inherent nature to positively promote flows throughout the organization
- Train appropriately using familiar business situations in the process to solidify the experience and kick-start usage (this may mean training in a departmental manner with some customization of training material)
Network Considerations
Plan for the network impact of the desired usage, not necessarily the expected usage
- IT organizations often have a pessimistic view of user adoption, educate the organization’s non-IT leadership and let them define the desired usage
- Users often adopt UC features virally, even without formal training
- If there is not adequate bandwidth for a feature, ensure that it can be disabled until the bandwidth becomes available
- Consider impacts to both wired and wireless networks
- Remember the impact of latency on real-time communications and ensure that application architecture, network design, and usage patterns are collectively considered
On-premise or Hosted?
For good reason, hosted/cloud services are a major area of focus right now, but they aren’t yet right for everyone
- Primary trade-off of moving to cloud services is the reduction in flexibility/feature set
- Evaluate the importance of extended integration (i.e. integration with LOB apps, existing infrastructure, etc.) versus generic services such as instant messaging and web conferencing
- Complete voice and video offerings are still a challenge for cloud providers due to regulatory and bandwidth concerns
- B2B and B2C options are often severely limited or not available when leveraging cloud offerings