Enterprise Connect: It is the People

31 Mar 2015

Enterprise Connect 2015, celebrating the 25th year of the conference, was foremost about people. For one week in March, the Gaylord Palms in Orlando transforms into the largest gathering of people interested in communications and collaboration technology.

EC2015 was a forum to see old friends and colleagues and make new connections. It was a refreshing in-person event in this increasingly virtual world. Bringing approximately 6,000 people together to talk, debate, share opinions and information related to communication and collaboration technology is exciting. You could definitely feel this excitement in the sessions, on the exhibition floor and in the after-hours events. (I especially enjoyed Jim Burton's annual UCStrategies wine tasting!)

The focus on people was expressed this year in an increasing emphasis on user experience, usage and adoption, and customer journeys. Three phrases that each emphasize that for technology to be successful people need to use it and a solution must advance concrete, measurable business objectives. Focus first on the "What," the business objectives, and then the "How," the most appropriate technology solution.

Like all my UCStrategies colleagues, for my sessions I focused on presenting information to help people move forward on their UC and Collaboration journey. I was honored to take part in six sessions this year.

Focusing on People Drives Success with Lync

In my well attended annual "Living with Lync," aka Success with Skype for Business session, I shared how having a new Siberian husky puppy reinforced many relevant lessons related to UC. Many of these lessons dealt directly with the "people component:"

1. Organizations that struggle with Lync Enterprise Voice have the wrong people on their team.

Lync is proven as a viable PBX replacement. Lync can absolutely deliver enterprise-grade voice. However, organizations continue to struggle primarily because they don't assemble the right design and implementation team. Lync failures are most often people failures, not technology failures.

Like any other voice over IP solution (VoIP), Lync and Skype for Business requires a foundational network that prioritizes, and has been designed to support, real-time traffic. If your team is lacking real-time network engineering experience you will likely fail. If your team has server and application experience but lacks telecom experience then you will likely fail. If your entire team has never implemented Lync before, you might succeed, but there will be very tough times - nothing beats experience.

2. Usage and adoption for UC is key to ROI.

No technology solution succeeds if people fail to adopt it. Successful Lync and Skype deployments need to drive usage and adoption. "Usage," measuring the quantity of a service consumed, typically minutes or calls or conferences, but more importantly, "adoption," tracking those people who are using the service is key. Broad-based adoption, lots of people, is the path to UC implementation success.

If you are not cultivating enthusiasm around your Lync or UC deployment you will likely fail. If you are not encouraging users to report actual or perceived issues and then aggressively tracking down and responding to these reports then you will likely fail.

Confidence in a Lync voice solution must be earned and protected. As noted above, Lync absolutely can serve as a PBX replacement, even for large enterprises; however, the technical design and implementation is only half the battle. You must communicate, manage change and encourage user adoption. Caring for the people is more important than caring for the technology.

3. You need to train people.

Notwithstanding misguided arguments to the contrary, training people how to use your deployed communications tools is a critical success factor. No enterprise solution is simple enough to forego training. Training inevitably increases overall efficiency and improves the return on investment (ROI) for any technology. I previously explored what makes great training and wrote:

"Training is good. Training is important. Far too many articles suggest because you use consumer technology at home you should be able to use 'similar' enterprise technology at work with no training. They are wrong."

The Final Session of EC2015 Focused on People

My Living with Lync session was about people and the Locknote session on Thursday morning, the final session of EC2015, was also about people, well, really characters. Fill the stage with four opinionated UCStrategies colleagues (Marty Parker, Dave Michels, Michael Finneran, and yours truly) plus Sheila McGee-Smith and Zeus Kerravala, neither lacking opinions, add Fred Knight and Eric Krapf as mini-Oprahs and then listen to what happens. This is one session that you may very well want to listen to the recording of if you missed it. Even though I was there in person I plan to listen to the session again; lots of great people and lots of interesting perspectives and insight.

For me, Enterprise Connect 2015 was all about people. I would like to conclude with a thank you to one specific person, Fred Knight. Thank you, Fred, for including me in the fascinating world you and Eric have built. May the skies be clear and the wind fill your sails as you continue your journey.