Unified Communications: Why and How

Unified communications accelerates the integration of business processes by enabling seamless collaboration between team members, partners and suppliers, and so supports high performance. Accenture offers a systematic step-by-step approach to implement unified communications, streamlining of business processes to increase efficiency and revenue growth, and enhance security.

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How to Launch a Plan for Unified Communications and Collaboration in Three Steps
Accenture’s Bob Hersch explains that all it takes is a few first steps.

How to Adopt Unified Communications and Collaboration: Three Phases
Bob Hersch explains how to move from the planning stage to the actual process of implementation.

You can also watch a short video to hear Bob Hersch, the global managing director of Workplace Technology & Collaboration, discuss Accenture's Unified Communications solution which has been developed with strategic partners Avanade and Microsoft.

Increasingly, organizations are interacting with geographically distributed teams, partners and suppliers to execute a range of business process across the supply chain.

Although the number of ways to communicate has grown rapidly, organizations still struggle with collaboration. Companies that develop a strategy to implement unified communications—an approach that accelerates collaboration-intensive business processes and enables collaboration in context between team members, partners and suppliers to occur seamlessly, virtually and instantly—solve many of the challenges of enterprise communications and ultimately enable high performance.

This strategy helps private-sector organizations to improve competitiveness, and public-sector organizations serve citizens more effectively. The contrast with traditional information technology solutions, which only focused on technology features and IT-based cost reductions, could hardly be greater.

The fact that unified communications technologies have lots of features and seem exciting is not enough; there has to be a clear and compelling business case with significant benefits.

As yet, companies have not implemented enough unified communications solutions to present a fully mature business case, but Accenture's experience in the field already shows several clear benefits:

• Cost reduction through improved and streamlined business processes and supply chain, as well as the ability to work in a virtual environment.
  
  
• Revenue enablement by enhancing the customer experience.
  
  
• Risk mitigation by promoting business continuity through the availability of multiple communications channels.

For unified communications to be successful and promote high performance, an organization must do the following:

1. Define the end state in quantifiable business terms.
   
2. Take a holistic view, but a phased approach.
   
3. Define and measure the quality of service.
   
4. Manage the change, not just the technology.
   
5. Treat communication technologies like enterprise applications.
   
6. Select long-term technology partners, not just the cheapest short-term vendors.
   
7. Plan for a single integrated network.
   
8. Simplify standardized architectures.
   
9. Plan to reinvest cost savings from earlier phases to fund later phases.
   
10. Focus on the business and enable critical business processes, not just technology-based productivity.

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