Unified communications is a rapidly emerging technology that can enable the business to reduce costs, mitigate risks and generate revenue.

Historically, information technology was seen as an end in itself. Companies expended large sums to upgrade to new technologies based on features – and then tried to determine the business benefits they were achieving. This “build-it-and-they-will-come” mentality, however, no longer works in today’s highly competitive, global business world. Today’s technologists need to be enablers of the business, helping their company streamline  processes to reduce cost and enable revenue generation. Each innovation must be geared to help the company achieve high performance.

Unified communications (UC) is a rapidly emerging technology that can enable the business to reduce costs, mitigate risks and generate revenue. Organizations are increasingly interacting with geographically distributed teams, partners and suppliers to execute their business processes. In response, the number of ways to communicate has grown rapidly in the past decades by pager, fax, e-mail, Web conferencing, video conferencing, mobile phones, short message service (SMS), instant messaging and, of course, conventional telephones and teleconferencing. Despite the many ways to communicate, we still find that collaboration is difficult. UC offers a significantly enhanced technology solution to solve the challenges of enterprise communications. UC’s value is its ability to help an organization improve its competitiveness in the private sector, or its ability to serve citizens more effectively and efficiently in the public sector.

Collaboration-Intensive
UC is a set of integrated communications technologies and capabilities that accelerate collaboration-intensive business processes. It enables collaboration between team members, partners and suppliers to occur seamlessly, virtually and instantly within one’s working context. The ability to streamline business processes results in cost savings through greater efficiency, and revenue growth by enabling incremental sales. This same technology will also mitigate risk by improving security, creating unified logging across all channels (for compliance) and creating a connectionless environment that is more resilient to component faults.

UC is the innovative combination of several technologies and capabilities to fulfill a communication need, rather than a single product that can be purchased off the shelf. It combines converged network infrastructures, enterprise communications channels and “presence-enabled” business applications, which are presented to the user via a common interface. Converged network infrastructures are consolidated, IP-based, quality of service enabled, wired/wireless networks to transport voice, data and video communications. Communications channels are the multiple ways in which one can be contacted, and “presence” indicates which communication channels others have available to them to collaborate and prefer at a given point in time. These technological components are combined in an integrated and seamless fashion and presented to the end-user via one unified communications interface. The unified interface can be embedded in business applications, so communications can be launched from within any application in which the user is working. UC is the combination of these technology components.

UC solves the challenge of quickly contacting others via the right channel for the right purpose at a given point in time and establishing a common log of those communications across channels. Currently, people often have to try several channels to reach another party to establish communications. To contact someone, one usually tries calling the other person’s office phone. The next step is to call the other’s cell phone. From there, usually a voice mail or an e-mail is sent. This trial-and-error approach often creates significant lag time before people connect. As a result, business processes can be significantly delayed. UC solves this problem by enabling us to be contacted the way we want to be at any particular time. As each user device logs onto the network, it will show the user’s state, and when combined with calendar and hierarchical user prefer information, this creates the foundation of presence, which allows other appropriate users to understand how best to contact them.

Even once the correct person is reached, it may be necessary to switch communication channels. Traditionally, this is done by manually exchanging contact information for the next communication channel. How many times have you ended an instant messaging session by asking for the best phone number of the other person? UC also allows collaborators to seamlessly switch from one channel to another, such as from a phone conference to a Web conference to view an electronic document or to exchange ideas via a virtual whiteboard. With UC, people work together more in real-time to accomplish a task, as opposed to today’s round-robin exchange of documents and ideas.

As business becomes more competitive, many organizations are finding they need access to information trapped inside employees more quickly. It is often not only a matter of contacting the appropriate person, but finding who the appropriate person is based on role, knowledge, location, time zone and busy/free status. This knowledge mining of human resources is becoming more important not only for contact centers, but also for virtual and geographically distributed organizations. The fact that this technology has many features and sounds very cool is not enough; there has to be a clear and compelling business case with hard benefits.

Unified Communications in Action
The impact of UC on the way an organization does business obviously depends very much on the details of that business. Consider this scenario: A shipment is held up in customs. A form must be supplied in the next two hours or the shipment will be returned. Using a context-specific presence list, Jana sees that there are four available resources from the shipping department available. She opens an Internet messaging session with all four.

Only two of them are familiar with the form. Two drop off and the other two decide to move into a conference call with Jana. UC allows this switch of channels to occur seamlessly. One of them, Jim, is working overseas at a client location. He has an electronic copy of the form but only knows how to complete the customs broker section. Jim has access to the Web but not e-mail or fax.

The other, Josh, is working from home and knows how to fill out the form – but does not have a copy. They all switch to Web conference mode so that Jim’s electronic version of the form can be viewed. UC allows this switch to be accomplished seamlessly. They complete the form together. Once it is complete, Jana sends it via outbound fax servers to the customs agency, and the shipment is released.

This example shows a heroic use of UC, but the true power of it is tapped when it is integrated into the standard business process and applications interact directly with end-users. This takes UC beyond productivity to truly enable the business to compete in ways that it could not compete before.

Scot B. Bailey is the chief network architect with Accenture Technology Consulting.  He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .