Strategies for Unified Communication

With travel budgets getting slashed across most organizations, it's time to start thinking differently about how to communicate more effectively without traveling. We surveyed more than 60 key CIOs to find out the issues and challenges faced in achieving this, and how to resolve them. Here's what we found.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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The current economic crisis has impacted the travel budgets of most organizations, among other budget heads of course. While we've received this response from almost every CIO we've met on various occasions, we decided to approach a wider base of CIOs to see if similar sentiments existed everywhere-and the bad news is that they did! We surveyed more than 60 key CIOs from leading Indian enterprises to find out this and how were they planning to combat it. More than 60% of them were from mid to large enterprises having a turnover ranging from 500 to 5000+ crores. More than 80% of them had faced travel budget cuts. The rest of them were lucky, as they had not faced the situation yet, and we sure hope others become as lucky as them soon too! But for now, 23% are facing more than 50% travel budget cuts, 26% have cut it by 30-40%, and the rest of the math can easily be done; else you can refer to the graphs for more information. There were also a few who had taken voluntary travel budget cuts.

The results we got from our survey are very interesting. For one, organizations today are finding it difficult to manage multiple modes of communication. There are integration issues, difficulties in organizing meetings between multiple locations, reaching the right people at the right time, among others. Given this situation, there is a strong tendency to consider a move towards a unified communication environment. Our survey results showed that 37% of the CIOs were planning to deploy unified communication in the near future. The second most preferred option being considered for future deployment is VoIP. Interestingly, the most preferred mode of communication amongst our survey respondents was video conferencing, and more over, the preferences were broken between standard definition VC, high definition VC, and TelePresence.

Presented in this story are the survey's results, which would provide insights into what kind of communication channels are in use across Indian enterprises, the kinds of issues they face with them, and what options are being considered for future deployment to tackle those issues.

State of communications budgets
Needless to say, the cut in travel budgets has put greater pressure on the IT departments to enhance their organization's communications systems. 80% of the CIOs completely agreed with this statement when asked. We were expecting this greater pressure on the IT department to translate into an increase in IT budgets for communications systems enhancement for everyone. However, to our surprise, it didn't. 40% of them said that their IT budgets for communications were likely to remain the same. This didn't of course mean that they wouldn't spend anything at all on enhancing their communications systems. It meant that they already had certain budgets allocated for the task, which were unlikely to increase, even under so much pressure. There were though, another 26% lucky CIOs, who were likely to increase their budgets for enhancing their communications systems because of the pressure. And lastly, there were 27% unlucky ones, whose budgets were likely to decrease.

But despite all this, there is a positive side of the picture as well-Most CIOs remain confident of the capabilities of their existing communications systems. More than 60% of them were completely satisfied or quite satisfied with their communications systems; while another 25% of them were just satisfied. This left us with only a few CIOs who were not that satisfied.

These results might appear quite surprising, because on one side there's greater pressure on the IT departments to enhance the communications systems; while on the other, CIOs are satisfied with what they already have. Does this satisfaction mean that CIOs are not facing any issues with their existing communications systems? Not really.

Assess your communication modes
The communications world has today given us ample technologies to reach out to others. This may not seem apparent at first, but if you start counting the number of modes of communication being used in your organization, you'll be surprised. At the basic level, there are three ways to communicate with others-voice, video, or data. Now for each mode, there are different technologies available. For voice, there's PSTN line, mobile phone, and VoIP. For data, there's email, chat, fax, calendar sharing, whiteboarding, etc. For video, there are different types of video conferencing-standard definition, high-definition, web-based, etc. Even within each of these, there are multiple choices available, and different solutions available from different vendors or service providers.

In our survey, we split the various modes of communication into 12 parts (see graph). We kept the most basic modes of communication, like landline phones, PBXs, email, fax, etc out of the list because there would hardly be an organization that doesn't have them. Out of the rest, instant messaging was the most widely deployed mode of communication, followed by audio conferencing. Surprisingly, the use of BlackBerries and PDAs is gaining ground amongst Indian enterprises, with 58% of the CIOs saying that they were already using it. Interestingly, data/web based conferencing solutions are not as widely used. Only 37% of the CIOs were actually using them. Considering that every organization today has Internet access, these should actually be the most commonly used solutions. The newer communication modes, like Presence, TelePresence, and Unified Communications are not so widely used. 11% of the CIOs had already deployed unified communications, and a majority of them were from large, 1000 Cr+ organizations.

Identify the key issues
The biggest challenge organizations face with their existing communications systems is in organizing meetings across multiple locations. Should it be audio, video, or data based? This task can be quite daunting. Chances are that you won't have all three modes of communication deployed across all locations. Two regions might have video conferencing, while a third region can come in over audio only. Moreover, the fourth region's person could be on the road and only reachable on the mobile phone. So you have to figure out the preferred mode of communication for each region before organizing the meeting.

The next biggest challenge that CIOs face with their communications systems can be considered as a consequence of the first one--too many parallel communication channels are actually hampering productivity. There are many reasons for this, and a discussion of all of them is beyond the scope of this article. But the main point is that so many communication channels can be used as well as misused. Or, there can be integration issues between them, leading to loss of productivity. So having multiple communication channels is a necessary evil.

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