Planning Your Unified Communications Deployment

Many elements of a unified communications (UC) deployment follow in line with the basic steps of an IT project: establish the scope, plan objectives, develop a risk analysis strategy, establish security, pilot, deploy, support, and so on.

These should be part of any IT manager’s modus operandi. However, there is more to the early stages of UC adoption than may meet the eye. We spoke with several industry experts to gain their opinions on how managers should take their first UC steps.

“Start with the people and sites in your organization who’ll benefit most,” suggests Microsoft’s Matthew Woodget, senior product marketing manager for UC. “This can be information workers in general, distributed teams in particular, mobile workers, new sites, etc.  Consider how you, as an adviser to your CIO, can focus the project so it not only increases efficiency and cost control but also digitizes the front end of your business, enables innovation, and improves your ability to compete in a business environment where growth is essential to success.”

Woodget advocates mapping out your business and communications needs and challenges. Then identify how enhancing communications can help resolve those problems. If they can, great—you know where to focus the lion’s share of your attention in the deployment. If not, then perhaps you’re barking up the wrong technology tree, at least for the present. IT has spent several decades digitizing back offices. Some businesses may not be quite ready to see their fronts digitized—but most probably are.

According to Allan Mendelsohn, director, unified communications marketing at Avaya, it’s important to keep in mind that UC is not a single technology or even a single initiative.  UC is a vision that executes over short, intermediate, and long-term time spans, and it will likely change in detail and perhaps even objective along the way. By improving communications to enable better collaboration and faster decision making, benefits will range from soft to hard and tactical to strategic. But this hinges on having the right plan in place, and every good plan must anticipate change, including change based on the present communications solutions.

“Few organizations have the luxury of starting with a clean slate when it comes to deploying UC,” says Mendelsohn. “Plans must deal with your current infrastructure and portfolio of applications and how you will extend or migrate to current day solutions. Then, in recognizing that the definition of UC is evolving, plan to have the flexibility to adapt to future business models and requirements and new technologies and applications.”

In reality, one person or even one group within the organization is highly unlikely to have the perspective necessary for a successful UC deployment. Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner, notes that effective planning requires input from every effected group. Moreover, management must be able to select the right people from each group to participate in the project. Office politics may come into play here, but allowing personalities to interfere with UC planning will only harm the deployment in later stages.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.