July 1999

THE CALL TO UNIFY

BY LINDA STEGEMAN

We have all heard the cry: A communications revolution is taking place, not only in the United States, but worldwide. Converging voice and data, a network of networks all over the world, people are breaking down communications barriers and enriching the human collaborative experience. Open communications affects every facet of communications, and at its heart lies a remarkably simple idea: any user should be able to access, exchange, and manage messages and information from anywhere, for anyone, at any time, on any device, and on any network. In other words, at the heart of the communications revolution, there is a practical call for unified messaging.

Unified messaging should be thought of as a range of capabilities, not a single product or feature. Enterprises can adopt messaging solutions that bridge, integrate, and ultimately unify communications. These evolutionary stages allow enterprises to take advantage of their existing infrastructure as they progress into more advanced applications, enabling their employees to access and exchange information without regard to media.

WHAT GOOD WILL IT DO?
To be widely embraced by the business-networking community, unified communications solutions must be designed with an underlying understanding of today’s work world. Let’s take a look at two indisputable truths of business in the digital age:

1. Today’s business professional is overwhelmed with information. More messages of more media types — voice mail, e-mail, faxes, memos, etc. — arrive incessantly. Some are important. Some are not so important. Some are junk. Businesspeople want to regain control over the information around them.
2. Business today respects no boundaries — not of geography, not of time, and not of technology. Commerce is a global, 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week, all-inclusive phenomenon.

With these two truths in mind, here’s one vision of unified communications. Single interfaces — accessible via a telephone (wired or wireless), computer, or another data device, such as a hand-held scheduler — will offer access to voice, fax, and e-mail messages, intuitively prioritized and sorted. Systems will emerge based on every type of platform (customer-premise equipment, network-based equipment, wireless connections, etc.) and suitable for every business environment. Both data and telephony solutions and technologies will be put to work to accomplish the ultimate goal of every IT department existing on the planet: to keep information flowing efficiently and cost-effectively.

End User Benefits
For end users, unified communications will mean new levels of convenience and efficiency. Via simple Web- or voice-enabled interfaces, end users will dynamically select, configure and use the features and access the information relevant to their particular jobs and lifestyles. Some users might choose only the most basic functions: greeting management; message features such as playback, forwarding, and reply; and call transfer. Others will take advantage of more sophisticated features such as constructing their own call-routing paths. Unified communications will help end users carry out their responsibilities more effectively, efficiently, and easily.

Enterprise Benefits
Enterprises, too, will realize a multidimensional range of benefits in adopting unified communications solutions:

Improved customer service: First, by linking call-routing functionality with task-management applications such as calendaring, unified communications solutions will make it more likely for customers to get live, immediate responses from the people they call. But unified communications will also make messaging a more effective activity. Sales personnel will have easier access to e-mail and fax messages from clients when traveling. Important voice messages (historically storable for only a finite number of days and then deleted) will be saved in customer soft files forever, retrievable by all appropriate personnel as often as necessary. These capabilities and others will allow enterprises to respond to their clients more quickly, intelligently, and thoroughly.

Higher productivity: An independent study conducted by The Radicati Group in December 1998 showed that enterprises implementing a particular unified messaging solution gained about 30 minutes of daily productivity per user. Productivity suffers when employees must manage phone, fax, and computer communications with multiple, dispersed tools. In a unified communications environment, a variety of time-wasting activities (waiting on that one important telephone call, standing by the fax machine) will be rendered obsolete.

Streamlined workflow: Information will be exchanged more easily. Voice messages, for example, will be attached to e-mail messages and forwarded on to new recipients. Cycle time will be reduced. And because access to information is optimized, decision-making will be accelerated.

Better cost control: Some of the economic benefit of unified communications will appear subtly; others will be more immediately measurable. For example, today, an enterprise incurs two charges when one of its professionals dials in to retrieve messages and then returns one of the missed calls. A unified communications solution that links those two activities in the same session could allow users to return calls in the same call that they retrieve messages, reducing enterprise telephone bills.

Enhanced security: An access telephone number, a subscriber-identification number, and a numeric password of between four and eight digits are the tools for ensuring security over most corporate voice-messaging systems today. E-mail systems are protected by more sophisticated mechanisms. Unified communications solutions, which apply e-mail’s stringent security measures to all messaging media, will deliver a higher degree of across-the-board security for enterprises.

ELIMINATING DOUBT
Resistance is a characteristic of every revolution, and the communications revolution will be no different. There has been and will continue to be a great deal of skepticism regarding the practicality and feasibility of bringing unified communications to the business world, just as there was in implementing voice mail, e-mail, local area networks, and even the telephone. And, just as with those earlier advancements, the doubts will prove to be unfounded and, eventually, laughable.

Here’s a sampling of what we’ll likely hear in the coming years:

“Unified communications is nifty, but the return-on-investment cannot be justified.”

— The independent 1998 study referenced earlier showed that organizations recovered their investment in one particular unified messaging solution in less than four months. Every company observed by The Radicati Group saved money when compared to what they would have spent with separate voice, e-mail, and fax messaging systems. In addition to enjoying the employee productivity gains, these enterprises slashed ongoing IT support and administrative costs by 70 percent. The overall cost-of-ownership case for unified communications solutions is indisputable.

“Unified communications is merely another internal productivity tool and does nothing directly related to customers.”

— Unified communications does streamline workflow, and this is no small benefit. Additionally, by enabling quicker, more-educated, live response to client requests even in this age of increasingly mobile work forces, the first implementers of these solutions will also gain a considerable competitive advantage in their markets. There will come a day very soon, in fact, when implementing a unified communications solution will be a requirement of mere competitive survival.

“Unified communications will be just another layer of complexity, and business is already overwhelmed with gadgets it can neither easily use nor efficiently support.”

— It’s true that nothing would hamper the growth of unified communications more severely than complexity. Consequently, the emerging solutions will be easy to deploy and support, and will also be highly configurable by the user. Call-routing patterns, for example, must be simple to construct via a graphical, Web-based interface. There will be tiers of functionality, allowing users to dynamically enact only those features that they feel are appropriate and that they feel comfortable using.

WHY IT WILL HAPPEN?
From one perspective, the communications revolution could be viewed as merely an outgrowth of technology development. Industry trends, such as the maturing of Internet Protocol communications and speech-recognition solutions, are converging with today’s communications technologies. Togeth-er, these trends are enabling the current infrastructure to evolve into a revolutionary network of networks. The emergence of unified communications solutions will rationalize the power of convergence for end users by delivering simple, powerful, and dynamic tools for the management of any type of information.

But the real stimulus for this revolution is demand. Businesses today need the combination of benefits unified communications will deliver. Businesses and end users alike are demanding it.

Linda Stegeman is vice president of marketing, Messaging Solutions, for Lucent Technologies, Enterprise Communications Applications Group. Lucent Technologies develops, manufactures, markets, and services advanced wired and wireless communications products and systems, for large and small enterprise customers in the United States and in 90+ countries around the world. For more information, please visit their Web site at www.lucent.com.