Career Building at Enterprise Connect 2013Career Building at Enterprise Connect 2013

Enterprise communications are changing, which creates the perfect environment for career building and leadership for those who seize the day.

Times of change are times of opportunity. Enterprise communications are changing, which creates the perfect environment for career building and leadership for those who seize the day. It's pretty clear that both mobility (what's in your purse or pocket?) and applications (been to the iStore or Google Play lately?) are forces that are shaping the future of both enterprise and personal communications.

To make the most of these opportunities, you will need to see beyond the usual evolutionary changes and understand where and how the new technologies, methodologies and approaches will open doors for transformation of business operations as well as telecom and IT. Enterprise Connect 2013 has a number of sessions which will help you see these breakthrough possibilities as the foundation for a brighter future for yourself and your organization(s).

Here is my recommendation and invitation to three sessions that will help you do just that.

First, join us on Monday, March 18, from 9:00 to 10:45 AM in the Sun B room for "Implementation Options for Unified Communications." You will see that there are three very diverse options for implementing Unified Communications (UC) and only one of those starts with a PBX. You will also learn how to sort out the choices for your organization so that you can lead your team to the best, most economical and highest-return decisions. This session will also provide a picture of how the various vendors fit into the UC (and Collaboration and Social Business) market picture which will enable you to guide the conversation and create the roadmaps for your organization while getting the best from your selected vendors.

Second, join us on Tuesday, March 19, from 2:30 to 5:30 PM in the Sun D room for "Designing and Implementing CEBP for Your Organization." CEBP means Communications-Enabled Business Processes, which is the application of these new UC (and collaboration and social business) tools to revamping business processes in ways that have real bottom line impact. This session will help build the critical career skills of understanding, vocabulary and tool sets for talking with the operating units and lines of business in your organization. The session will show you where and how to find the real paybacks from a UC investment.

This session also includes real, intense presentation and panel time with four leading UC and CEBP vendors--Cisco, Microsoft, NEC and Siemens. Leaders from each of these firms will show us how their customers are using the new UC technologies to redesign their business processes and workflows. Just think of this CEBP session as the wave of technology that will go far beyond where contact centers, web sites and self-service have gone so far, and you will see why you don't want to leave this session out of your career-building plan.

Third, you'll want to attend the RFP session, "UC Without Buying a New PBX" on Wednesday, March 20, from 2:30 to 5:30 PM in the Osceola B room. In this RFP, seven vendors will show us how to get all the features and benefits of UC without spending the time and effort of replacing the PBX, phones, trunks and other evolutionary (i.e. non-transformational) technology.

Not only does this free up your organization to move more quickly to gain UC benefits, but it will save a bundle compared to a PBX replacement, savings you can redirect to funding new initiatives such as the CEBP apps mentioned above. You will also see how far these vendors have come with mobile device UC software.

In addition, these three sessions will help you understand how the different IT/Telecom departments need to work together for success. It's pretty clear that the future will include participation by team members from telecom plus infrastructure plus applications and web services plus desktop productivity. It doesn't matter which group you are in now, you will want to nurture relationships across these teams so that you don't duplicate when you can cooperate.

Hope you can include these three sessions in your Enterprise Connect Orlando 2013 agenda. We'll do our best to give you information and insight you can really use!