Is Your IT Organization Ready for UC?Is Your IT Organization Ready for UC?

We asked that simple question in yesterday's VoiceCon webinar, allowing the audience respondents to decide for themselves what UC meant and was going to entail in their enterprise. The question--whatever UC will be in your company, is your IT organization ready for it? The answer, based on 97 responses: 60% said no. To me, that almost seemed low, given how nascent a technology UC is, and how sparsely deployed. In fact, according to data presented by one of the webinar speakers, Sandra Palumbo of Yankee Group, many companies are still learning about IP telephony.

We asked that simple question in yesterday's VoiceCon webinar, allowing the audience respondents to decide for themselves what UC meant and was going to entail in their enterprise. The question--whatever UC will be in your company, is your IT organization ready for it? The answer, based on 97 responses: 60% said no. To me, that almost seemed low, given how nascent a technology UC is, and how sparsely deployed. In fact, according to data presented by one of the webinar speakers, Sandra Palumbo of Yankee Group, many companies are still learning about IP telephony.Sandra presented Yankee Group research showing that just over half of respondents feel "somewhat capable" of supporting IPT. As you can see from the figure below, the biggest concerns are around end user training and security. I'd call out that third item, Change Management, as possibly the sleeper issue, because IPT certainly brings about a lot of change.

Yankee Group asked the survey group which tasks they called in professional services to help with, and as you can see below, security was the second highest. I think it's interesting that about 1/3 used professional services in business case development/TCO analysis; I'd be interested to see if this actually translated into better TCO and ROI. As we learned from Robin Gareiss of Nemertes in a previous webinar, there must be diligent followup if you're going to realize the opex benefits that IPT is supposed to bring.

Interestingly, Sandra Palumbo and Yankee Group found less than 10% of their respondents used or will use no professional services whatsoever:

We've talked a lot about how the IPT replacement process has been very incremental, and how this is mostly due to enterprises' reluctance to get rid of fully functional TDM systems. But clearly the process of getting the organization ready for IPT is also moving incrementally. My guess is that this is effect rather than cause: Organizations aren't getting ready for IPT until their companies actually are about to implement it.