Artilium

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Survey Measures the Pain of Unified Communications; Waiting Is the Worst

While communication tools have proliferated, communication and collaboration with co-workers is becoming difficult. That’s where Unified Communications (UC) comes in. This post from CXOtoday.com provides some helpful examples to illustrate worker frustration and underline the need for a solution that effectively connects co-workers to get the job done.

In a word, workers are mobile and distributed and need solutions that bring together fixed and mobile telephony, e-mail, faxes, instant messaging and conferencing (audio and/or video) into a single message delivery system. With voice, data and video traffic all on one network, users can send messages without bothering about what device the recipient will use to retrieve them.  However, messaging is just a part of it. A message must be delivered to the right device at the right time to the right person and, more crucially, the recipient should be able to respond to it immediately, the post argues. Against this backdrop, presence - which lets workers know who’s reachable where, when and how - is critical.

What is the business benefit? Being able to combine all your communications tools - voice, data and video – and, better yet, being able to initiate a voice call, get into an instant messaging session or send out an email straight from the application, streamlines workflow and boosts worker productivity. To drive home this point the post walks us through a real-life scenario that needs no further comment.

“If you are, for instance, discussing a complicated business issue with a partner - via an instant messenger - and find you are not really being effective, you can quickly switch to voice communication, or try video conferencing, or call up a shared desktop or whiteboard, or any other mode of communication best suiting your purpose. With the flick of a button, as it were, a fax message can be converted into a voice mail. Similarly, an email message can be converted into a fax, or even ‘read’ aloud by a handheld device, and voicemails can be translated into text even before they are played. In other words, you have many choices to pick and choose from.”

Clearly, UC solutions increase optimization and decrease worker frustration, but it’s always good to have a few relevant data points rather than state the obvious. A new survey – aptly entitled “Measuring the Pain: What Is Fragmented Communication Costing Your Enterprise?” – quantifies the cost of “business as usual” and ignoring the need to replace fragmented communications with a UC solution. The survey, conducted by independent Canadian research firm Insignia Research [www.insigniaresearch.com], polled 517 communications end-users across North America and Europe.

In a nutshell, companies that maintain the status quo stand to lose a whopping $13 million. The main money-eaters are lost productivity (due to workers waiting for information or failing to reach the right people at the right time) and expenses (due to increased travel to be sure all project team members are on the same page).

Vendor spin aside (the survey was commissioned by Siemens Communications), the user survey goes beyond the numbers to detail the human cost of fragmented communications, such as workflow disruptions, frustration and anxiety. It concludes that UC is the solution to a myriad of business problems.Among the pain points:

• 94 percent said “waiting for information” from colleagues who were not available when needed was the most common and costly pain point. The average length of this delay, which is directly attributable to the use of disjointed systems, is 5.3 hours per week, resulting in an average annual cost of over $9000 per user.

• Collaboration based on existing communications systems is not effective, and forces managers to synchronize teams through expensive face-to-face meetings requiring travel. Respondents estimated they spent eleven days this past year on unnecessary or avoidable business travel. The extra time on the ride is not only bothersome; it means an annual waste of at least $3400 per person.

• The run against the clock is a losing battle due to the absence of effective, remotely-accessible collaboration tools. This lack of parity reduced productivity by an average of 7.8 hours a month for respondents who spent at least 10% of their time working from remote locations.

The takeaway: When user frustration and pain are evaluated holistically, and hard dollars quantified, companies of all sizes and sectors are leaking cash and losing competitive advantage. Fortunately, UC solutions provide a logical and actionable path to improved productivity and take the pain out of synching work efforts across teams and around the world.