Making the (Hard) Case for Unified Communications

Mike Fratto, editor of Network Computing, recently posted some good thoughts on how he sees making the case for unified communications.

Solid business case

Of course building a solid business case, for UC or for anything else, is the first important step. As Fratto correctly notes, executives "want to know specifically how UC will make the business more profitable and efficient."

Rightfully so, too -- if some young hotshot came to me as CEO with talk about "unified communications" and asking for budget, that’s the first thing I’d want to know. And as Fratto as well notes, there haven’t always been good, as in number-crunchable, answers to that.

PBX license," as he says, since you’ve got such costs as software licenses, servers to run the system, new handsets and headsets, gateways to the PSTN and all kinds of other stuff, not to mention training. And people however try to get budget by emphasizing soft benefits, frequently not much more substantial than "It’s cool, it’ll be better and everyone else is doing it." And they’re surprised when the boss says no.

But if you in effect believe UC is critical for your business, at the time as Fratto advises, "make a multilayered business case.Go deep and get your financials in a row based on the totality of the system, not the individual parts."

Lot more impressive

That will look a lot more impressive. Hey, find out where the pain is and solve it -- Fratto gives an example of listening to a manager complaining about cellphones ringing while meetings. Fratto mentioned that Microsoft’s OCS, when paired with a Windows phone, can disable ringing and alerts based on calendar events. As he says, the manager "perked up, leaned over the table and said ‘That! I want that’!"