UC and Social in the Enterprise (Part 2)

In part 2 of this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies experts discuss a recent post on nojitter.com by UCStrategies' Blair Pleasant, titled "Will UC be subsumed by Social? Heck No!"

Blair Pleasant moderates the conversation, and is joined by UC experts Kevin Kieller, Dave Michels, Steve Leaden, and Jason Andersson.

Questions raised in the article and discussed here: Is the move away from unified communications to collaboration and social just a marketing and branding exercise, or do you think the value of UC is losing steam? How difficult is it to integrate UC Social and collaboration? Is it too much to ask of IT, and is using all of these tools too much to ask of users?

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Will UC be Subsumed by Social - A Follow Up, by Blair Pleasant
• UC and Social in the Enterprise (Part 1)
• What's In A Name? "UC," "Lync," and Now "Social Business", by Art Rosenberg

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant of UCStrategies and welcome to part 2 of our Industry Buzz podcast where we're discussing unified communications and social business. For this part, I'm joined by Kevin Kieller, Dave Michels, Steve Leaden, and Jason Andersson. Today we are going to talk about unified communications, collaboration and social business, and will the need for unified communications go away as companies move toward collaboration and social business? Kevin, you have some thoughts about the earlier discussion. Let's hear from you first.

Kevin Kieller (:34): In listening to my colleagues, the thing that strikes me is that we are really in many ways speaking around some of the key questions that Blair asked at the beginning. Is UC going to be subsumed by collaboration? I think that there have been many good opinions, but I think really Don, for me, said it the best.

We need to ensure, whether we are talking UC tools or social tools, that we look at the use cases, that we focus on the specific problem as Don says, and then get it solved by picking the right tools. I think with that focus, the question is reframed and it really depends. So if your business problem that you are trying to address involves the need for having communication tools combined with the social tools that we're seeing in the marketplace, then yes, as part of the broader unified communication umbrella there may be the opportunity to combine these two tools.

Unified communications really has always been about putting together different one-off tools to make it easier for end users, to make it more cost effective, by having an easier job operating these tools, potentially a reduction in operation staff, and potentially less management tools in terms of managing the technical complexity. But somewhere we have lost sight. I think that vendors originally adopted UC as a rebranding of VoIP and they thought that by labeling things UC they might be able to sell more. Now, as Blair points out, we are seeing vendors re-label things as collaboration tools or social business tools. But it does come down to defining your specific problem and then identifying the tools that make the best solution to the problem.

Blair, you asked at the beginning as well, "Is it too much to ask from IT?" With my development background and because I oversee many UC implementation projects, it is complicated to interface multiple tools together and especially if they come from multi-vendors. So once again, it is important to understand why we are putting all these tools together. As we pile on social tools, if there is a good business need, then yes, maybe there is a case to go through the additional complexity and put these together.

From the user's perspective, is it too much to ask from the user's perspective? I am going to disagree with Art, where he says UC means nothing to the end user. Combining the tools was supposed to make it easier for the end user, so if your business problem requires putting tools together, the idea is that it is going to in fact service the end user. And to a large extent, I want people to think about an example. I have my Windows phone that I am holding up in front of me and really it does combine some of the unified communication tools and social tools together. So I've pulled up my contact for Dino Caputto, a partner with me at Enable UC, and my choices that the phone presents me with is call mobile, text him via SMS, write on his wall in Facebook (arguably a social tool), a mention on Twitter (once again a social tool), send him an email, map his home address... So all of these things on the Windows phone, on the client, have brought together arguably combining UC and social, and potentially providing me with some business or some ease-of-use benefit. So I think that is happening, but as I have said many times, focus on the specific problem you are trying to solve and then find the tools to solve that. Thanks and back over to you, Blair.

Blair Pleasant: Dave, you always add good insights to these discussions, what are your thought on the shifts going on in the industry?

Dave Michels (4:51)): One thing that the communications industry is really, really, really bad at is figuring out terminology and how to communicate within the industry. The "unified communications" term has always been a point of confusion. There has been a lot of debate over the scope and breadth of what is included in unified communications. That term has never really become a mainstay term, but it is also not going to go away. The PBX, although no one makes one anymore or at least will not admit to it, certainly will never go away.

Now we are seeing the conversation shift toward collaboration. Some vendors consider collaboration more around conferencing, others considering it more around desktop sharing or multi-user access into documents, and now the latest version is we are starting to talk more about social. The reality is, communications, telecommunications, or enterprise communications is always shifting and evolving. It is always throwing things in the way to see what is going to stick. In addition, certain things are going to stick and certain things are clearly going to evolve. Voice communications will continue to evolve. We are seeing some fairly significant changes over the past few years.

For technology that is a hundred years old, it is pretty impressive. We have the HD audio becoming more common. We have a number of capabilities around unified messaging that are becoming robust and one-number reach - that kind of stuff. We are all seeing presence and instant messaging becoming something that will stick to the wall as part of the UC suite and obviously something that is not going to go away. Video is increasing. In addition, social is a bit of a question mark, but we know it is not going to go away and we know that it is a form of communication that we are going to integrate.

Now, how it integrates is a little unclear. There are some obvious things I would love to see happen, but it is going to require vendor cooperation, which I do not see happening just yet. However, things like directory management, being able to look up a phone number on your UC client that could also not only access the corporate directory, but also maybe access Facebook or LinkedIn to look up numbers. That kind of thing I can see being very valuable. Email is not going to go away right away, but email is changing in how we are using it. Many of the social communications tools are using email as a notification component.

It is all coming together and we have seen the UC client (this is what we talked about last week) very much expand around these new forms of communication. I suspect we are going to see more and more social elements added to the UC client. The problem with the term "social" or "social communications," or "social networking" is very broad and very nebulous. It is not clear whether things like SharePoint fall into that circle, whether email falls into that circle - it is a moving target.

Therefore, I do not think that the communications industry, based on this track record, is going to really figure out an accurate name for this. UC is a good term. UC plus social, might be a good term. I do not think UC is going to go away and I do not think social captures the multi-modal capabilities of the communications suite that we are talking about. But it is all here to stay and it is all important. It is a great part of the journey and we are going to continue to work together to figure out the best way to communicate.

Blair Pleasant: Insightful as always, Dave. Steve Leaden, what are you hearing from your consulting clients?

Steve Leaden (8:39): From our vantage point with the clients that we see utilizing UC and not utilizing UC, there is definitely a dilemma going on out there. I think really what we are seeing with our clients and the success of UC being deployed out there is this: the dilemma is that voice over IP is typically coupled with UC on the tail end and most implementations for UC are not stand-alone. They include some component of voice over IP at the front end, network enhancements on the front end and the whole kind of holistic look at voice over IP for getting the network ready. In the meantime, UC tends to take a back seat and doesn't really get the attention that it really needs.

Therefore, a couple of talking points here. Number one is that UC really needs to be treated as a totally separate project. There needs to be awareness, it really needs to be looked at with separate training, and a separate project involved. There needs to be a look at the change in the culture that is going to take place within the entire organization. If UC is done right, it can be culturally changing and that is probably the most difficult step for any organization to change culture.

Then finally, you really need to have strategic thinking and planning around a UC deployment model. With those, UC per se is not just an application. It is not just like adding SAP or other kinds of apps on the network. SAP as we have seen with other clients, really takes or becomes its own project and can even be multi-year in some cases. ERP and CRM being similar in nature, as well. So let's get UC on the same kind of priority and I think we will see some major changes.

Some other talking points: you really need to look at it in terms of how the business will be utilized and how it can be enhanced with UC. You again need to create a project around it.

In addition, the other real dilemma is that cost of UC from a software licensing and server point-of-view is really not the same price point as a holistic voice and data network replacement for voice over IP. It is a lot less than that. Therefore, it typically does not get the attention that it needs. I would again look to that as well.

In my opinion, I really believe that as people become more and more mobile and virtual, which is organizationally changing anyway and culturally changing for most organizations, we will see dramatic shifts in favor of UC. We have already seen such a shift with technology companies. I know that when I work with the various providers out there; the Avayas, the Seimens', the Ciscos, the Mitels, the Microsofts of this world as an example, we do see these kinds of companies working virtually with engineers. They are literally working remotely and we will sometimes never even meet them. So they have actually changed their culture and done the transition. So now it is how the other industries and how the other customers transition.

Blair Pleasant: Great, Steve. Jason, let's turn it over to you. You wanted to make a comment about terminology and discuss some of the trends you are seeing.

Jason Andersson (11:49): Hi everyone. I think the concept of using social in the enterprise is one of the most exciting areas of unified communications to date, actually. And, I really like your article there in nojitter.com. It sorts of sums up the direction we're going. In your article you mentioned that the industry's looking for a new name or should be looking for a new name, but I actually don't agree. I think the term unified communications actually is a very good one. I actually talk about generations of unified communications where the first generation of unified communications focused on instant messaging and presence. You had the OCS and those things, but then you have the second-generation unified communications. It's really where we are today, more or less, in most companies, which is look at unified communications as an extension of the mail server or as an extension of the PBX, depending on, of course, where your - what part of the industry you're coming from.

So, if you were Microsoft or IBM, you would come from the main server perspective and view unified communications from that perspective. And, if you're a Cisco or an Aastra or a Siemens you come from the PBX side and you sort of add to your use to unified communication that way. However, what we're now looking at is what I call a surge in the direction of unified communication, and this is really where things become unified in a much more clear way. And, I agree with you, Blair, in your article where you said that communication is going to be core also for social type of functionality. I like to call it the network employee functionality because that's really what it's talking about.

I spoke to an HR manager in Denmark after the conference where I was the keynote speaker. She actually came up to me and said that she thought this was really exciting because in the company where she works, in the problems that they face, the challenges that they are facing are too big to fit in one person's head. You have to add more people into the problem-solving arena to actually solve these things. So collaboration becomes essential for these types of companies to survive.

What I also think is interesting is that we need to see a change also in the other tools that today are outside of the concept of unified communications or social networking. And, that's in document creation and document management, which is a completely different area from what we're used to being in when we're sitting in in terms of usage strategies.

Here, it's not any longer a term of "it's my document." I'll start a document and then we work on it together. It becomes more of a co-creative process where a document is the end result but it is something that we work on in a tool that we use together. Of course, communication is the core infrastructure for this to work for this to be a function that we actually can benefit from.

Now, I see four trends moving or pushing, if you wish, or enticing unified communications to take this third generation step. One is cloud, and cloud is obviously a lot of different things. So this is what I'm talking here is the third layer of cloud, software and service, not the platform where infrastructure has a service. And, cloud really is helping the trend of mobility of always getting access to this. And, of course, you can imagine that if we have a co-creative process and the availability of resources is not always in the offset and it's not always in the same time zone. So you need time persistent ways of communicating. So what we today call chat rooms or blogs and those types of technologies are going to be much more important, which is as, you could say, a social way of working.

The other area, because you have mobility and then you have cloud, so two big trends. The other two is actually the change in the contact center or the customer service side becoming much more, let's call it "co-creative" there, too, where the customer service process becomes something that the customer and the enterprise actually develops together. That can be through external websites where users or customers meet to discuss and help each other with the assistance or support of the actual company. Or, it can be that agents and customers share an experience together to be able to solve a problem.

The fourth area then that I see impacting the area of unified communications is social. I don't see social as a concept that will change UC into something else that we need a new name. I actually see it as one of four macro trends, if you want to use that word, that actually is changing the DNA of unified communications. So that's sort of my take on it in terms of this thing. If a company is looking to work out a strategy for unified communication, they need to have a social way of working in that process. I've worked with companies implementing this, and we see tremendous benefits from this, adding the social component or the collaborative component, if you want to call it that, together with real time communication components. There are a number of examples where they've done measurements and seen improvements and actually money saved in terms of cost of travel or faster time-to-market and things like that, real true measurement that you can actually show and present, which I understand you're also going to show and present, Blair, in the show in Orlando.

A company working on a strategy needs to take new ways of working into consideration; however, this becomes much less the technology track than it is a culture track. A company needs to set up a process for how to change a company culture from an individual creation process to a co-creative culture where sharing is the fundamental concept. So that's going to be an important part. Thank you.

Blair Pleasant (17:48): Thanks, Jason, and I'm glad you liked my article. Thanks, everyone, for a great discussion, and I'm sure we will have more discussions about this topic as the market continues to evolve. See you next time.