IT Priorities Affect UCIT Priorities Affect UC

We surveyed enterprises on what's most important, plotted against what's most difficult.

There are two distinct perspectives for IT priorities, important to accomplish and difficult to implement. These are sometimes coincident and in other cases quite divergent. IT priorities will influence what part of Unified Communications (UC) will be implemented with what pain.

Webtorials performed a survey, sponsored by Sonus Networks, looking into the financial value of UC. As part of the survey, the respondents were asked about their IT priorities. The Webtorials report, "2012 Economic Impact of SIP in the Enterprise" covered a number of IT concerns for enterprises with more than 500 employees. The mean size of the responding enterprise was 8,700 employees.

One part of the report focused IT priories as shown below in Figure 1 "Most Important vs. Most Difficult Enterprise IT Priorities". The vertical axis specifies the difficulty, with the top of the figure as most difficult. The horizontal axis goes to the right with the most important priorities. As you read this blog, think about where your enterprise would fit on the graphic, Figure 1.

"Reducing the cost of IT" is easy to guess, as this is on nearly every IT department's mind every time there is a budget to be created or when an unforeseen event occurs like a loss of data, security breach or a failed network. Unfortunately, it takes money to run a smooth operation that can economically contend with unforeseen events. The tighter the budget, the harder it is to prevent these problems.

One of the driving factors behind UC adoption is reducing wasted knowledge worker time. Improving collaboration means more efficient employees. UC is an investment that will produce reduced costs to many in an enterprise. But the investment comes before the financial benefit, which can be hard to justify.

At the other end, less-prioritized of the chart is "Integrating and managing a multivendor environment". I am surprised that this rates so low, because it is most likely that multiple vendors will be involved with UC implementation. The position of this priority may indicate that many enterprises are looking forward to working with only one or two vendors to deliver UC.

Another low priority is "Integrating and managing e-mail, phone, text messaging and social networking". I can believe this, except for the social networking part. Social networking integration may not be important, but I do think it will be more difficult than anticipated. It is likely that the respondents have not fully grasped the difficulties of dealing with so many social networks and their widely varying operation, security and privacy terms and conditions and the boundary between business and personal information.

"Implementing business process improvements" is one of the real goals of UC. However, this requires both thorough knowledge of the business and changes to the way business is operated. The lack of process knowledge is probably one of the major impairments to success. If the processes have to be changed to encompass UC, then there will be a training period and early limitations before the UC functions will improve the business process. Success will not be self-evident immediately.

The other major priority, "Mobility management and security," is a moving target. It will remain high as a priority especially with the whole BYOD issue. The other factor for mobility is the constantly improving mobile devices that can become obsolete in a year. Add to this devices integrated in cars and trucks and entertainment systems. The desktop PC and laptop look very stable compared to mobile devices.

I think that "Implementing cloud solution" will move further to the right, "Most Important" relatively soon. It may however, continue to be viewed as not difficult to attain. This is one of the goals of cloud based services.