Unified Communications and Collaboration: A day in the life
The UC&C Promise
Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions promise an integrated communications experience embedded within standard office automation applications. Combining the traditional telephony world with IT, UC&C’s goal is to provide a seamless user experience, increase intra and inter-company collaboration, reduce travel time and improve overall productivity.
Not only does UC&C make communications integral to our daily workflow, it also does something which is both subtle and profound, in that it breaks the traditional association between a user and a handset. Your identity is no longer tied to a fixed device. In the past, in order to phone someone you would simply call their phone number. That phone number would be tied to a fixed telephone handset. If the person was not where the handset was then you might be able to leave a message, but otherwise this was not a great experience. The advent of mobile phones meant you could call that person when they were away from their desk and on the move, but again if they were busy or the phone was switched off then this was still an unsatisfactory situation.
The beauty of UC&C is that it breaks that traditional fixed association between the user and device. Now all you need to know is their user handle/ID and the system will take care of everything else. UC&C allows you to escalate an Instant Message (IM) session to a voice call and/or video call at the press of a button. If you want to share your desktop or run a whiteboard session as well – no problem. Your mode of communication be it real-time/synchronous i.e. voice/video or asynchronous such as IM or email can be readily tailored according to the occasion. You don’t waste time calling people when they are not there or are unavailable, as the system automatically knows when they are on-line and available and alerts you accordingly through their ‘Presence’ status. Moreover with features like extension mobility and single number reach you don’t need to worry about where that person is or what device they happen to be carrying; be it PC, tablet or smartphone. If the system tells you they are on-line and available then you are good to go.
The UC&C Reality
A properly engineered and well-maintained UC&C solution is a thing of wonder and can profoundly transform the way we work; making us more productive and effective wherever we are or whatever device we have with us. ‘Work is what you do, not where you go’ is a mantra made real when UC&C works well.
Sadly, all too often the reality fails to meet up with the promise. A typical user experience can look something like this.
Skype for Business Instant Messaging and Presence (IM&P) generally works well for ad-hoc and scheduled collaboration meetings but due to a rushed implementation occasionally suffers from unreliable voice and video quality as more users join the meeting (for Skype you can insert your UC&C app of choice). This is quite inconvenient and frustrating and also wastes a lot of time, as users scramble to find a stable form of communications just before their meeting is due to start. To work around this reliability issue, some people run a separate audio conferencing bridge to handle the audio channel and leave Skype for Business for screen sharing only. The call organiser will have to politely remind the Skype for Business users to mute their audio channel to avoid the inevitable howling voice feedback on the call as they have two live audio channels open. As Skype for Business has not been enabled for voice dial-in, at least half the attendees can only use a traditional audio bridge anyway when on the move or away from the office. So the benefits of an integrated user experience are already somewhat diluted.
Some users have not been adequately trained on Skype for Business and/or have not been issued with (or can’t be bothered to purchase) a suitable noise cancelling headset. Some users do not even have Skype for Business installed at all, meaning that the traditional audio bridge is the only sensible default option. So far, not so unified.
To make matters worse, the Marketing department has decided that WebEx Teams is the way forward for them and no longer use Skype for Business unless they really have to. So if we want to work with Marketing we need to install WebEx Teams. Facilities has rolled out Cisco Spark Boards (now re-branded Webex Boards) in some of the meeting rooms in the HQ office but no-one has been trained on how to use them properly and moreover they don’t integrate with Skype for Business. They look quite nice though. The Finance team insist on using a home-grown collaboration tool and have never adopted Skype for Business, so we need to have that tool installed when we want to work with them. The Sales team use salesforce.com which comes with a Yammer social plug-in. IT is now replacing the standard-build Cisco IP Communicator softphones with Jabber. Jabber not only provides traditional voice calling but also includes its own IM&P and screen sharing capabilities which overlap with Skype for Business. Skype’s already tenuous hold as default UC&C tool is now under serious internal threat. Scheduled UC&C meeting calendar invites are now being received for Skype, Jabber and WebEx, so you need to use all these apps whether you like it or not. Let’s not also forget that the Bid team is trialling Microsoft Teams which is Skype’s successor.
From the promise of collaboration and increased productivity with a seamless user experience, we have ended up defaulting to traditional audio conferencing for our basic collaboration needs or alternatively juggling various poorly integrated tools according to which community we are working with.
When we need to collaborate with clients and partners, if we’re lucky, we will be federated with some of them. Skype should work OK, although some functions maybe disabled for security reasons to avoid inadvertent data loss. More often than not clients/partners will have chosen an alternative UC&C application, so we’ll need to use Cisco WebEx, Cisco WebEx Teams, Cisco Jabber, Unify Circuit or Microsoft Teams to mention but a few.
This is not the same class of problem as the challenges faced when collaborating with internal colleagues as generally speaking you do this less often. The need to operate a slightly different tool is therefore manageable. That said, better federation would be nice, so that you can work in your favourite UC&C tool and the integration happens in the background. After all, the whole idea is that it should be seamless?
A combination of fragmented adoption, competing systems, poor implementation/performance, inadequate system federation and patchy user training has tarnished the UC&C dream.
How to avoid UC&C sprawl?
General guidance on how to avoid the fragmented islands of communication and poor adoption seen in practice is really just common sense. In a nutshell, have a crisp, clear and agreed strategy, choose one UC&C product and commit to it and drive adoption from the C-suite down, not the bottom up.
Guidelines for successful adoption:
UC&C Adoption is a Business Change program rather than a traditional IT rollout and should be treated as such. Understanding the business requirements and having a clear vision for how to get there are paramount. This must be coupled with robust project planning, slick execution and a sustained follow-up program to embed best practice behaviours. Simple, but not always easy.
Senior Network Engineer
6yGreat article.
Infographer : Information Designer
6yGreat article Tim. I like 'Provide qualitative and quantitative metrics to track adoption and user experience'. There might also be a set of more strategic goals & metrics for how better 'communication' and 'collaboration' achieves an overarching purpose and ROI.