Hyperconnectivity Leads to Enterprise Transformation

Hyperconnectivity is a mega-trend, through which everyone and everything that can benefit from being connected to the network will be connected. Hyperconnectivity can be transformational to enterprises by not only impacting how work is done, but also by redefining how work and business processes are organized and accelerated in a business environment. This opportunity has five value dimensions:

Enhanced Personal Productivity and ESAT: In the transformed enterprise, the hyperconnected employee no longer has to deal with missed calls, telephone tag, and email overload. Employee productivity goes up as does morale and loyalty. And we know that there is a direct link between motivated employees and loyal customers.

Seamless Mobility: In the transformed enterprise, seamless mobility allows users to stay connected through fixed mobile convergence, bridging the enterprise wired and wireless environment with the public wireless network. With a ‘true broadband’ experience everywhere, the unwired enterprise becomes a reality.

Rich Collaboration: Knowledge and information workers are paid to make decisions, while the amount of work that relies on group input is increasing significantly. In the transformed enterprise, rich collaboration capabilities are provided to allow knowledge workers to work together effectively across a highly distributed environment and deliver faster and higher quality outputs.

Business Process Acceleration: Gartner (News - Alert) has estimated that 85 percent of business processes are slowed down through human latency. Unified communications can accelerate human processes by enabling timely closure with key stakeholders, and shortening the ‘time to X’ where X can be problem resolution, service, product, revenue and so on. Enterprise transformation comes with enabling applications and business processes with unified communications capabilities.

Real-time Everything: With enterprise transformation, business applications become environmentally aware by incorporating abroad range of inputs (e.g. sensor, location and RFID). This results in improved energy efficiencies through building management systems; better utilization through asset tracking systems (e.g. a fleet of trucks, medical carts); improved risk management through enhanced security and hazard monitoring; and improved effectiveness over a full spectrum of location-based services integrated into communications-enabled applications (e.g. for better response to emergency situations).

There are three steps that enterprises should follow to meet the challenges and capitalize on these opportunities. Firstly, start laying the foundations for enterprise transformation in the form of software (not network) -centric unified communications. Secondly, start engaging your applications folks, identifying opportunities for streamlining human and electronic business processes. Thirdly, free up some dollars by assessing opportunities for multivendor networks that can better serve you in the hyperconnected world. IT

Tony Rybczynski is Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies at Nortel (http://www.nortel.com).

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