Blair Pleasant Shares Her Thoughts on Unified Communications

Blair Pleasant is a UC Expert and co-founder of UCStrategies, as well as President and Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC. She has over 20 years of experience, and has written multitudes of market studies, white papers, and research reports. As part of our series on UC Experts and their views on Unified Communications, we spoke with her on the ups and downs of UC, and her thoughts on its applications and future.

UCStrategies: What are you most excited about in the UC space?

Pleasant: Things are always changing and evolving. When UC solutions were initially introduced, it was all about presence and instant messaging, and the ability to view a colleague's availability status, send them an IM to quickly communicate, and escalate to a real-time voice call if desired, improving worker productivity. These capabilities are becoming more and more common, and presence is viewed as table stakes now. As UC evolved, it became all about collaboration and making it easier for teams to interact, share documents, initiate conferences and collaborative sessions on the fly, resulting in improved workgroup productivity. Now we're seeing a bigger focus on external collaboration, enabling better collaboration and interaction with customers, partners, suppliers, and so on, using various tools such as web and video conferencing, document sharing, desktop sharing, etc. UC is moving from the individual, to the workgroup, to the larger organization and its stakeholders.

The other thing I'm excited about is the impact of the cloud on leveling the playing field, making UC more accessible for small and mid-sized organizations. Initially, UC was aimed at large enterprises that have the budgets and IT staff to support UC deployments, and small businesses were essentially left out in the cold. With cloud services, even very small organizations can have full UC capabilities, without the capital expense or IT resources.

Another area where things are moving more slowly than I'd like is the integration of UC with enterprise social software. There's a lot of value in tying in UC capabilities with business-grade social applications such as Jive, Yammer, IBM Connections, Salesforce Chatter, etc. Users can click-to-call and click-to-conference from the social software's activity feed, blog, forum, without having to leave the application. Social software is great for finding subject matter experts and people within the organization, but it's missing the real-time communication element, which UC provides. Integrating the two, within a single user interface, enhances the value of both technologies exponentially.

UCStrategies: If you could give one piece of advice to UC customers (those already using UC or looking to start), what would it be?

Pleasant: Just as carpenters say, "measure twice, cut once," the same is true when it comes to UC - plan your strategy carefully first, before deploying and rolling out the solution. A UC strategy should include the user cases, the business case, how to measure success, which workers will have access to which capabilities, how UC will fit into the organization's existing infrastructure, training, and so on. Without a well-thought out strategy, organizations are unlikely to get the user adoption and results that they're looking for. UC is a business tool that enhances and changes the way people work and communicate. It also impacts the corporate culture in some ways, especially when it comes to collaboration, which requires user training and education so that they know what to expect. Not all users are comfortable in collaborative environments, and some will be resistant. They need to understand the value and benefit of these new tools, how to use them properly, and how to get the most out of them. Developing a strategy that includes not just the technology, but how to best utilize the tools to ensure user adoption is essential.

UCStrategies: Have you seen UC used in ways not originally intended or expected?

Pleasant: At one university that integrated UC with the university's internal portal, students were able to view videos posted by professors and other students, and check the other student's or professor's presence and easily initiate a VoIP call to discuss the video. By tying in UC with the university portal, students were able to interact more easily with each other and with professors, asking questions, initiating discussions, and more, without ever leaving the portal interface.

UCStrategies: What do you think UC needs to get to the next level?

Pleasant: UC needs to move from being a silo'd technology to being part of the organization's overall business. Today we have UC solutions, email systems, calendars and schedules, social software, third-party conferencing services, and more - each with separate clients or user interfaces. We all have applications or portals that we work in a lot of the time - for me it's my email inbox, for a sales person it could be Salesforce.com. With the next level of UC, which I call Optimized Communications, when a user needs to communicate with someone, they can contact that person from within the application they're in and communicate with them in the way that's most convenient for them, in any mode and any context, even when mobile.

Here's where it could really come in handy - if I need to have a discussion with Jim (Burton) about a presentation for UC Summit, I should be able to click on his name from my inbox or from a link in the Powerpoint deck, check his availability, and have a video or web collaboration session with him, and bring in Michael (Finneran) or someone else to join in if needed. That way, we can view the slides together and make changes to them, while having a real-time interaction. This would save us from having tons of emails going back and forth, with different versions of the slides that we kept changing.

These tools not only need to be easily integrated together, which is challenging in itself, but also get "baked in" to the business tools that workers use to get their jobs done.

With her experience in the field of Unified Communications, Blair has seen all the growth and changes, ups and downs, and many applications of UC so far. For more from her, keep an eye on UCStrategies.com, or follow her on Twitter as @blairplez.