A New Year's Resolution Suggestion

Happy New Year! Trust 2013 was good for you and that you can be even more successful and prosperous in 2014!

Thinking about what the UC&C (and VoIP) industry most needs in 2014 leads to this suggested New Year's Resolution for 2014:

"To avoid irrelevance, focus on adding business value through UC&C transformation."

Yes, this may sound harsh, but irrelevance is often a powerful motivator. Sure, there's the argument, heard many times, that, "Voice is not going away, so the PBX and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) are not irrelevant." But the evidence is pointing towards continued reduction in PBX-based voice telephony for personal as well as business use.

Here are some examples:

• E-mail is now the dominant business communications tool.

• Presence, to allow the user to select an available person before making a call, is reducing the number of phone calls and driving voice mail volumes to all-time lows.

• Instant Messaging is the preferred method for a short check on status or facts.

• A major portion of voice communications now happen in on-line conferences (you can check this for your own organization by comparing the reports from your PBX with the reports from your conferencing system or service). Increasingly, users join these online conferences via laptops, tablets and smartphones over the Wide Area Network (WAN) or Internet. If they call in by telephone, often that is because the user is mobile, so they're using the cellular network, not the IP-PBX.

• Social networking tools are also replacing voice calls. Just look at the public valuations and usage of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to see this trend, which is rapidly spreading through the enterprise via IBM Connections, Jive, Yammer and other tools.

And, if that's not enough motivation to look for new relevance, let's notice that all of these new "UC-type" communications tools are already in place, with perhaps some remaining adoption of social networking in the enterprise.

So, here's the good news: A communications professional who wants to connect career and advancement to a growth engine need look no further than the improvements in business processes that are possible with Unified Communications tools, including VoIP as well as the new tools mentioned above.

The names for these initiatives are UC-B (Unified Communications for Business Processes) and CEBP (Communications-Enabled Business Processes), about which we have been providing guidance here at UCStrategies for a number of years. You can read more about UC-B and CEBP and about how to find these opportunities in your enterprise in the post today (Harvest UC Benefits in 2014) by my UniComm Consulting business partner, Don Van Doren.

If you embrace UC-B and/or CEBP with the same zeal that many communications professionals embraced call centers in the 1990's and contact centers in the 2000's, you can be associated with a major new growth vector for providing business benefits and, therefore, business value. Sure, someone will still be in charge of cutting one more penny per minute off the contract with the telecom provider, but that is really small potatoes compared to all the savings possible by improving the communications-intensive workflows in your enterprise's business processes. Again, take a look at Don's article for suggestions on how to finding the UC-B and CEBP opportunities so that, in 2014, you can:

"...focus on adding business value through UC&C transformation."

Happy New Year with best wishes for success and prosperity!