Challenges of moving to Unified Communication

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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There's been a lot of noise around unified communication lately. While the concept sounds great, and does hold a lot of promise, one can't blindly accept it and proceed. It shouldn't happen that your dream of enhancing employee productivity and providing considerable cost savings turns into a nightmare. So to prevent that, you need to take a well-balanced approach of analyzing the benefits it will deliver, and the pitfalls it can cause.
The first challenge that comes to everyone's mind is getting the management's buy-in for the technology. But even more challenging than this is gaining user acceptance. Will your users agree to using the new technology? You could get some of the most far-fetched excuses about not wanting to use it. For instance, one reason I got from somebody about not wanting to use video conferencing was that he didn't want to see his boss's face everyday. He would rather work in peace and not with the feeling that his boss can contact him at anytime.

Technology mis-use is another challenge you could face. If you thought blocking chain mails and joke attachments in emails was difficult, then what do you think will happen after you provide even more channels for communication? E.g. chat, online collaboration, video conferencing, audio conferencing, etc. How will you control their mis-use?

Another key issue to seriously consider is performance bottlenecks. As you add more applications to your network, they will consume higher bandwidth. Will your network be able to handle so much load? Is it ready? Some of the applications like audio/video conferencing would even require QoS. Will your routers be able to handle them? If not, then users will start experiencing performance issues, and form negative opinions about the whole deployment.

Integration issues also need to be looked into seriously. You would already be using email and many other communication channels, like fax, instant messaging, audio/video conferencing, etc. Will the unified communication solution be able to integrate all of them with each other seamlessly? Chances are it won't. So, you need to asses how much of rip-and-replace will be required.

Anil Chopra, Editor
anilc@cybermedia.co.in

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