InfoWeek Survey: Unified Communications ObstaclesInfoWeek Survey: Unified Communications Obstacles

By a comfortable margin, users said that the largest barrier to adoption of already-deployed UC capabilities was lack of end user training.

Our sister site (big sister...) Information Week ran a survey of more than 400 IT decision-makers last April, publishing the results in June--the topic was Unified Communications adoption (the report is available for purchase from Information Week Analytics. I'm going to post a few blogs highlighting some of their findings and offering my own thoughts about the results.

I'll start with the survey's findings about the state of communications deployments in enterprises today. Among those who reported that their enterprises were deploying UC, the most commonly-deployed technology was actually not VOIP, but IM, at least in terms of what's fully rolled out:

A couple of things to note here: First off, when you add in partial rollouts and pilots, VOIP surpasses IM. Secondly, it shouldn't be too surprising that IM outpaces VOIP in terms of deployment ubiquity: IM is IM is IM, and if everyone needs it, everyone needs it. By contrast, in most enterprises, everyone needs voice, but not everyone needs the IP flavor.

Now let's look at the technologies that respondents said were the top drivers of UC deployment:

Unified messaging obviously leads the way, which I don't find surprising, though I'm not sure there's a logical reason either for why UM leads or why I'm not surprised. It just seems to be the way this migration has gone.

The report's author, Jeremy Littlejohn, president of RISC Networks consultancy, notes IM's lead in the "fully deployed" category, and juxtaposes this with the fact that,

Why would the most pervasive UC technology currently deployed to your workforce, other than phones, not be a cornerstone of your strategy?

"The answer," Littlejohn writes, "is that end users are often afterthoughts."

To support this conclusion, he points to an earlier result from the survey: By a comfortable margin, users said that the largest barrier to adoption of already-deployed UC capabilities was lack of end user training:

Jeremy Littlejohn calls this out as the leading factor, but I think the problem is multi-faceted. Littlejohn mentions, and we hear at VoiceCon/Enterprise Connect as well, that end user training for UC is sorely lacking.

But in addition, the next two responses in the figure above really combine to tell us that a significant minority of businesses that deployed UC just haven't found it gave sufficient return on the investment--either the investment already made, or any prospective investment. I don't think you can dismiss that.

One final point on this chart, which on balance I find encouraging: The lowest-scoring response among those spelled out in the survey was poor vendor/VAR implementation. I think that 12% is still too high a number for this response, indicating that vendors/VARs have work to do, especially if more advanced UC deployments are likely to require more, rather than less, outside integration work. But at least this factor doesn't appear to be the major obstacle.

Similarly, I'm kind of surprised that lack of network QoS-enablement scored as high as it did; just goes to show that enterprises need to be reminded of the importance of pre-deployment network assessments.

I'll take a look at some more of the findings in future blogs. Again, to get the report, go to Information Week Analytics.