Elizabeth
How is your organization preparing to adopt and implement its
roadmap for IP telephony? Although IP telephony adoption has reached the
mainstream and most organizations have deployed it in several locations, future
planning should also consider how unified communications (UC) will transform
enterprise communications by offering new capabilities that facilitate business
processes and integrate voice into the desktop. 

The workplace landscape is dramatically changing — fueling
new requirements for voice communication and mobility within most organizations.
Top trends fueling this change include rapid growth in remote workforce, expanding
global coverage, proliferation of mobile devices, and the onslaught of various social
technologies. 

With UC, you can provide call control features directly from
the PC, users can see the availability of teammates, hover over their name to
see calendar information, and click on their name to call them. This will
improve the end user experience and spur a collaborative environment which
includes audio-, web-, and videoconferencing. Most importantly this
collaborative conferencing will add business value by reducing travel and
training costs, decreasing your carbon footprint, and by improving customer
experience. 

It is vital for IT infrastructure and operations managers to
fully understand the implication of these trends and to understand the emerging
market dynamics for collaboration and communication technologies. Your
organization will need to realign and get ready for UC support starting first
with understanding UC’s significance to your IT organization. 

In order to take advantage of a fully integrated solution, Forester
recommends that you develop your long term plans before you make any short-term
decisions. I’ve recently written on how companies can take steps toward a UC
future in my report, “Top Trends Shaping Enterprise Communications” Let me know what you think and where your organization is using UC today.

By Elizabeth Herrell 

Check out Elizabeth’s research