How To Evaluate Business Value For Unified Communications

Unified communications (UC) generates interest as a potentially important business tool to improve existing business processes and reduce costly business delays for time-sensitive situations. An intelligent software platform, it connects people to people and to applications directly and easily. UC also connects desktop collaboration technologies, such as presence, email, instant messaging, and Web conferencing with communication applications (e.g., telephony, audio conferencing, voice messaging, and video). Its intuitive user interface promotes adoption and usage of UC across the enterprise. To justify UC investments, organizations should evaluate UC's business benefits and IT improvements, and explain its full value — for example, how it enables faster response to critical situations, allows employees to collaborate more easily, and reduces overhead such as travel and conferencing expenses.