Virtual Call Center

The talk in the technology sector appears to be centered on the “cloud” as of late. With so much focus in this direction, it can become somewhat confusing as to what a company can expect from the cloud and whether or not they should make a move toward this platform. As captured in this Contactual (News - Alert) blog, the U.S. government is facing the same challenge and asking the same question.

As so much focus is placed on budget cuts and reduced spending in Washington, it stands to reason that the cloud would get more attention. Implementations, such as virtualized data centers and virtual call centers are gaining more attention as making the move to alternative methods of business processing is changing the game and demanding a new focus. 

The U.S. Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, recently focused on the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy report in which the main focus is “Cloud First.” The idea is to move the government from its dependence on enterprise software to a cloud-based strategy. The report highlights three primary benefits that those utilizing the virtual call center already enjoy: efficiency, agility and innovation.

The government plan outlines a potential 30 percent savings as compared with current IT infrastructure costs. This goal mirrors the savings that the private sector is already enjoying as companies in this space adopt a cloud-based strategy. Companies are seeing shared, secure computers provide more server utilization and fragmented systems that are consolidated to make management of IT resources faster and easier. Like these companies, the government can leverage key technologies in the cloud to deliver results almost instantaneously instead of spending years building out proprietary systems.

According to Kundra, a cloud-based strategy will enable the government’s IT infrastructure, which is traditionally slow and underutilized, to become more agile, thus more responsive to federal agencies’ needs. The could enables managers to pump up their computing capacity when demand requires it, as well as scale back when seasonality changes. All of this can be done with the simply click of a mouse, much like the capabilities of the virtual call center.

Kundra also argues that innovation can thrive under the cloud-based strategy, and this has been proven true in a number of commercial organizations who have already leveraged this technology platform. In moving the government to an environment that supports elements such as a virtual call center, IT managers can focus on providing service instead of provisioning servers to get the most out of the government’s IT investments.