Unified Communications
Means to an End

By Cara Garretson

Government agencies deploying Unified Communications can enable better, faster decision making by integrating communication into the process.

While information technology has become a key enabler in helping organizations through the decision-making process, it’s ultimately the people involved who play the most important role in making the right choices to grow the business or fulfill the mission. But what if those decision makers aren’t available at crucial times, or don’t have the necessary information at their fingertips to make the right decisions? Such hurdles can become serious inhibitors that result in missed opportunities, poor deadline performance, and lackluster customer service.
   
That’s where a set of technologies called Unified Communications (UC) comes in to help remove those hurdles to communication and availability.
   
When successfully deployed, UC takes what Forrester Research principal analyst Henry Dewing calls “human latency” out of the equation, helping organizations reach their goals and meet deadlines by enhancing communications and access to data. The technology components achieve this by putting all the necessary information in the hands of key people working on a project, and keeping those players in real-time contact with each other.

In a Perfect World

Within an organization, a team working on a project would use UC technologies to keep all the documents and other forms of data that are integral to the project in a shared application, such as a collaboration program that performs version control and other document-management tasks. The team would communicate in a variety of ways – land line or mobile phone, video or Web conference, e-mail, text, or instant messaging (IM) – and that communication could be launched at any time from within the applications that are key to the project. Presence features would allow each member to determine who else on the team is available at any given time, and unified messaging would gather the members’ voice mail, e-mail, and instant messaging
communications in one central spot.



“Many communications buyers are looking to advance their firms from a communications paradigm where end users reach for a device (like a phone or a PC) to communicate (via voice, e-mail, or IM) to one where the ability to communicate is embedded within a business process and users, or the process/application itself, select the most effective communication path,” writes Forrester’s Dewing in his 2009 report “Market Overview: Sizing Unified Communications.”

For example, one large IT services firm that Forrester interviewed for its report is using UC client software installed on technical experts’ notebooks to check their availability and remain in real-time contact with them during the implementation of a complex project. This helps the firm reduce the overall implementation time of the project, which has a direct effect on profitability.

However, the above describes an advanced state of UC deployment; most organizations that are leveraging these technologies have not yet reached that level. According to a 2009 survey by CDW-G designed to assess IT decision makers’ attitudes and progress towards the adoption of UC technology, only 6 percent of the 766 IT professionals asked said they have completed their implementation of UC; the majority of respondents said they were in the assessing, planning, or implementing stages. The CDW-G survey showed that the majority of federal government organizations polled are still in the assessment stage of adoption (see text chart).

Planning for UC can be the most difficult part of adopting the technologies, according to the survey. Organizations who participated in the survey and said they have begun implementation of UC listed the impact on existing infrastructure as the No. 1 challenge, followed by training requirements, time required to implement, capital costs, network security, technical support requirements, operating costs, service quality, and technology interoperability. One survey respondent said the reason that planning for UC is so challenging is because the change required by the technologies affect the entire organization. However, it’s also by making these changes across the board that organizations derive the greatest benefits from UC.

Other issues clouding deployment of UC that were identified by Forrester include confusion over which vendors will end up the dominant players in this area. Predicting which technology provider or providers will lead the pack in five years isn’t something most IT professionals are willing to stake their reputations on, particularly in a market such as UC that has been volatile in the past few years, says Forrester’s Dewing.

Equally confusing is the state of technology standards regarding UC. Despite the emergence of some industry standards, not all the major vendors are adhering to them, and not all of the standards are adequate to guarantee high levels of service, says Dewing. Therefore, expectations are that new standards around capabilities such as transporting live and streaming media will emerge in the next few years, making it a risky proposition to bet on existing standards and products today.

Stages of Deployment

Forrester’s Dewing defines two phases of UC adoption. Basic UC technologies allow users to manually select from a range of communications options – voice, e-mail, or instant messaging – from within UC client software that includes presence indicators to help determine the most effective means of reaching a coworker. Enhanced UC technologies achieve a higher level of communications integration by interfacing with business applications and multiple transport networks.

Dewing predicts that 2010 will be the year when UC integration and adoption hurdles will be cleared and organizations will begin broad deployment of basic UC capabilities. More complex integration of UC technologies with business applications and networks is expected to follow two years later, he says.
   
Regardless of what stage of UC implementation agencies are at, the goal is the same; to connect with team members in order to facilitate an agency’s mission, says David Hawkins, Unified Communications practice manager with Iron Bow Technologies, which develops lifecycle solutions for government and industry.



“Unified Communications is really the seamless integration of all forms of communication with the intent of the end result being speeding delivery of information so it can reach the right person at the right time,” says Hawkins.

UC adoption among government agencies is still in the early stages; Hawkins says he sees pockets of adoption, mostly concentrated in the intelligence and defense spaces. But as the benefits of UC become clearer, more agencies will begin adopting UC components to improve communications within the organization.

“Really where the benefits are for the federal government is in giving agencies a holistic view,” says Hawkins. “If over the years agencies have built siloed applications that don’t talk to one another, then  their adversaries or competition are not bound to the same restrictions so they can move much faster in passing information from entity to entity. Building silos of voice, video, data-sharing … it slows down the ability to share information from agency to agency, even within agencies. So unified communications increases the efficiencies and reduces the time it takes to share information.”

For those agencies that are beginning to look at UC, ensuring that their telecommunications infrastructures can support the often bandwidth-intense applications, such as video, is an important step.

“Infrastructure is the fundamental building block, you can talk about UC all day long but if you don’t have an intelligent network infrastructure to support it, the application won’t mean anything, and the mission or business won’t be successful,” Hawkins says.