Without a doubt, Unified Communications (UC) is a powerful technology with far-reaching ramifications into many sectors of business, not just communications. Yes, it significantly reduces the core cost of communications, but perhaps more importantly, it also raises productivity by streamlining the collaboration process. UC also allows workers to join efforts in real time across the extended organization, including customers, partners, suppliers, and any other critical components.

Unified Communication brings collaboration and communications tools together under a simple interface, thus removing much of the moving between devices and applications, which cause a great deal of human latency in the system. UC also allows companies to create applications with integrated communications functions, which is crucial to keeping a competitive advantage. 

Starting With UC

It’s true that UC can save you quite a bit in terms of long distance charges, trunking charges, system maintenance, IT personnel, and more.  These savings can add up rather quickly. Therefore, many enterprises like to begin with a small deployment, collect the cost savings, then use those savings to finance the rest of the UC solution. This makes success with the first phase of the deployment utterly critical. The management of the UC components, whatever might be installed first, is as essential as the technology itself. If the system is mismanaged, then most of the ROI will be lost. 

So how does a business implement UC successfully? What are the steps to take?

 Here’s the thing: An effective UC installation is going to require more than just great technology. It’s going to require great management as well. And even more importantly, it’s going to require a total-lifecycle approach to that management. This ensures that the solution will work when it’s deployed the first time, and it will continue to deliver a good experience to the end-user as the environment inevitably changes.

A Proactive Stance

By using the lifecycle approach, IT can more easily manage the challenge of ensuring a high-quality UC experience. This kind of approach allows IT to take a more proactive stance towards problems, by way of providing them with predictive tools to seek out problems before they happen. Contrast this with legacy methods of dealing with PBX systems, where IT personnel would simply react to problems that had an impact on end-users or network performance. 

An example of a proactive tool would be one that regularly measures voice quality. It can then establish a baseline for user experience for a set day and time. As the environment inevitably changes, the tool may show call quality to be degrading over time, thus enabling IT to solve the problem before users start reporting issues. 

Lifecycle Management

So what is the lifecycle of UC? The steps are these: 

1.   Assess your readiness, and analyze your configurations.
2.   Automated acceptance, regression testing, as-built documentation, and remote troubleshooting.
3.   Nightly available testing, KPIs, voice quality, configuration tracking and completion rate reporting.
4.   Device load distribution, trunk utilization reporting, and call usage reporting. 

And then back to Plan, where the cycle begins again.

Benefits to the Lifecycle Approach 

There are many benefits to this approach.

• It allows an organization to get the most value from their UC investment.
• High-quality, consistent user experience: This approach shortens diagnostic and troubleshooting time. One console for configuration information can allow administrators insight into changes that might affect service quality. Users will migrate faster and will use new productivity apps if their sense of them is both high-quality and consistent.
• Lower management costs. Good management of UC allows IT to create standard support processes and operational discipline. This discourages manual workarounds and keeps the management system scalable and simple. 
• Faster time to value. Better visibility into the workings of the UC system gives IT personnel a higher level of confidence in the system and also their ability to manage it. This confidence helps to lessen testing and development times.

Author Bio:

Michelle Patterson is an avid technology blogger and writes extensively about Communication technologies She works with companies that are introducing these technologies to make understanding them easy for regular people.