When renewal time comes around on your communications technology, you’re likely to explore other options, and you may see that unified communications is a clear choice for advancing your productivity and collaboration. Aside from a wide variety of features, unified communications offers scalability and reduced costs.
What begins as a launch of a disruptive technology that promises to improve decision-making processes and streamline communications often becomes an overly complex implementation. It may even cloud the benefits you expect to experience with the solution and negatively impact buy-in across your organization. It’s important to get familiar with the common enemies of unified communications.
Enemy Number One: Complexity
When implementing unified communications, it’s typical to focus on the technical requirements, features, and tools necessary for your business. This is the right approach, as long as it is accompanied by the other half of the equation: seamless implementation and convenient management of tools and features after installation.
Disconnected people and systems are the biggest problems facing a quick and easy implementation. The variety of parts that must be tested and proven need to be tightly integrated, and there must be a high level of collaboration between all parties involved, including managed service providers, consultants, providers, and vendors.
Another Culprit: Lack of Visibility
Complexity can slow an implementation and make launching unified communications challenging, but a lack of visibility creates an ongoing problem. Enterprises generally have a variety of phones and devices, as well as private branch exchange (PBX) and contact center systems that must all be visible as they interact with different networks and multiple cloud apps offered by a variety of providers.
In order to simplify the installation of unified communications, there are three main areas that need to be controlled:
- Enterprise communications systems
- Communications for contact centers
- The network infrastructure that supports communications
It turns out that a unified communications transition is the perfect time to unite the disparate people and systems under a single cooperative offering better IT transparency, performance optimization, and simplified ownership. Taking control of the above three areas allows for a triangulation of the ecosystems, which results in better analytics and more control over performance.
A single view of the technology is one of the most important elements for migration success, because it allows practical steps, such as scheduling bandwidth boosts during a peak usage period or assigning application prioritization.
From a design perspective, unified communications requires high levels of customization opportunities while remaining flexible for necessary alterations that may arise. Many options are available, including a hybrid design that combines legacy systems with unified communications to get the best of both offerings. Many enterprises find better results with a managed service provider that handles all aspects of communications. The ultimate goal is to deal with fewer partners and simplify the unified communications solution along with the broader technology stack.
To get started with a comprehensive unified communications implementation that takes complexity and visibility into account, contact us at Enterprise Visions. From choosing the solution that meets your needs to making the necessary infrastructure adjustments for a network that supports cloud communications, we can help ensure a seamless transition.