Trying to Drive Fast Instead of Fly With Unified Communications: UC Requires a Paradigm Shift Change In Thinking

 

Your company just acquired a new corporate Jet. Sleek, fast and state of the art. The best there is. But VP of your aging limousine fleet is at the conference room table, vehemently shouting "Why can't this new fangled thing even achieve 35mph when driving to the runway?! Our limo's can go 80mph on any paved surface!". Everyone around the table starts nodding. Intense discussion ensues about "Yeah, anyhow, why can't this go 35mph?" and the goal becomes "Surely there is some engine we can bolt on to the running gear to make this thing taxi 35mph."

And everyone forgets: This jet can FLY at 600mph!!

Unified Communication can make your company fly. Instead of: how can we go as fast as before, the question needs to be: How can we transition to flying? Going from 35mph to 600mph requires some fundamental changes in thinking about how we communicate in business. This will involve very real changes in communication flow everyday.

In  unified communications this means making several thing central. These items need to be leveraged to enable massive improvements:

• Presence
• Instant Message
• Communication Enabled Business Processes

What are some practical ways to do this?

 

The Old: I can use my deskphone to talk, talk or talk. (that’s it)

The New: with microsoft lync you can see presence, instant message, voice call, video call or share a desktop.

Instead of being forced to use one mode of communication, UC enables everyone and you can easily use the one the fits the need this scenario.

The Old: My old pbx could call me when someone is off the phone.

The New: Tag user for status change.

Instead of using a star key on your pbx to get a call when someone is off the phone, use "Tag a user for status change alerts". The nice thing about this is you can get an alert when they arrive at their desk, leave there desk or when they go offline/online. And no phone call interrupting you, just a nice little toast on your screen. And if you have federation to LiveMessenger/AOL/Yahoo/Office365, you do the same thing with those external contacts.

The Old: I have a button/light on a physical phone i can press to call a buddy.

The New: Using Lync contact list you can have more buddies and you can decide who your buddies are--not the pbx guy that set your desk phone up 5 years ago.

Use the Lync 2010 contact list. You can setup your own buddy list very easily. You can no only see when your buddy is on the phone but: are they in a meeting? away? offline? And you can also see what they are up to with the Activity note. If you are out of the office for a day you can see what your colleagues were up to when you where gone!

The Old: Look at a number on your computer screen, and type it on your desk phone.

The New: Just click on a number you looked up on the web and Lync will dial it.

Using the built-in in web click to dial feature, you can just click on a phone number and have Lync dial it for you. No more glancing back and forth between your screen and desk phone, getting it wrong a couple times, etc.

These are just a few ideas how  you can transition from PBX (limo) to Unified Communication (jet) thinking. 

PS-if you have more examples you would like to see here, leave a comment! I’ll add pertinent ones.