Many roads lead to Rome

Unified Communication & Collaboration (UCC) is more than just combining communications channels. In this article, analyst Dan Bieler, Director Consulting at IDC, talks about how UCC features permanently accelerates business processes when thoroughly integrated into the ICT landscape.

So much is so easy online. If you want to know when your planned UCC project will have paid for itself, you can use an online calculator. Just enter a few figures and the tool calculates your return on investment. As practical as this quick calculation may seem, it is also more of a gimmick. Professional IT managers would never base a serious project on such an assessment. One reason why not is that online tools do not factor in company-specific demands.

What's more, online calculators do not factor in how extensively the solution has been integrated into corporate processes. But it is the IT manager and CIO's job to create a communication infrastructure that their company can use to focus on core business more efficiently and productively. The benefits of UCC concepts do not truly make themselves apparent until these concepts have been thoroughly intertwined with a company's IT landscape – i.e., when they function as more than just a pure PIM (Personal Information Manager) solution that manages personal data such as contacts, appointments, tasks or notes. Instead, UCC should be used to support and improve business processes, as is the case when they are integrated into customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) activities. Software providers – including SAP and Oracle – have been planning to integrate UCC components into their current applications for some time now.

To page 2: Successfully integrating UCC into systems To summary: UCC strategy at a glance