From UC to Enterprise 2.0

You are likely familiar with the definition of unified communications espoused by my colleagues at UCStrategies and now broadly accepted: “communications integrated to optimize business processes.”

The International Engineering Consortium has put some more meat on the bones by underscoring the importance of both individual and workgroup productivity. According to the IEC (News - Alert): “UC encompasses … unified messaging, collaboration, and interaction systems; real-time and near real-time communications; and transactional applications. … Multimedia services include messages of mixed media types such as video, sound clips, and pictures, and include communication via short message services. Collaboration and interaction systems focus on applications such as calendaring, workflow, IVR and other applications that help individuals and workgroups communicate efficiently. … Transactional and informational systems focus on providing access to m-commerce, e-commerce, voice Web-browsing, weather, stock-information, and other enterprise applications.”

The linkage of UC with collaboration is key, especially in our reset economy, where business leaders need to think of business processes that extend beyond the bounds of the enterprise throughout the supply chain as well as to customers, channel partners and affiliates. Today it’s all about growing top line revenue while ringing costs out of the system so that shareholder value is optimized. Enterprises need to be sensitive to change and effectively and efficiently adaptive to it.

IBM (News - Alert)’s 2009 Global CIO Study makes just that point. Customer and partner collaboration, business process management, business analytics and, yes, UC were all within the top ten CIO responses to the question: “What kind of visionary plans do you have for enhanced competitiveness?”

By and large, business agility is, today, discussed in terms of the benefits of contextual collaboration, which refers to people-to-people collaboration from within communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). Contextual collaboration is adaptive in that it brings the right set of collaboration elements to the user, in a manner sensitive to business context. But is application context sufficient for contextual collaboration? What happened to social context? The fact is that our communication and collaboration activities are mediated by a set of social rules. The more intimately we attempt to communicate meaning, the more visual our communication needs to be.

Enterprise social networking platforms take advantage of micro-blogging, RSS feeds, rating, tagging, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies to enable business agility. The more easily new insights spread across your organization, the faster your business can respond to changing customer expectations and business conditions. All this may be well and good, but there are a few big caveats! Enterprise social networking only supports agile business investment to the extent that it connects the right people to the right information fluidly and easily and with appropriate levels of security. IT

David Yedwab is a founding partner in Market Strategy and Analytics Partners (News - Alert) LLC (www.mktstrategy-analytics.com).

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