By Robin Gareiss / President and Founder of Nemertes Research
IT staffs have an incredible responsibility to implement and support enabling technologies to transform their companies. In fact, more than 70% of companies have digital transformation initiatives underway or planned, involving numerous technology deployments to drive business value.
Before jumping into a technologically advanced digital transformation initiative, IT leaders must make sure the technology foundation is properly engineered to support emerging applications that transform everything from internal processes to customer experience.
Often, this means pushing the brakes for an innovative project that, for example, may require more robust network engineering or communications capabilities. After all, without a strong technology foundation, the project is at risk for failure.
Each year, Nemertes conducts research on digital transformation, interviewing and surveying 600-700 organizations. Consistently, the research participants cite Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) as one of the top five technologies required for successful digital transformation projects.
UCC serves multiple functions for digital transformation initiatives, including the following:
- Provides internal communications and collaboration channels (voice, team collaboration, video conferencing, web conferencing, instant messaging, etc.) for project teams to execute on and manage their digital transformation projects
- Reduces travel costs by eliminating the need for at least some in-person meetings, replacing them with video conferences
- Delivers collaboration channels to use externally–for example, enabling communications with customers over video conferencing or team collaboration
- Provides ongoing communications channels to track success or issues from the transformation projects themselves
- For any use of the UCC apps, helping to make quick decisions by reaching the right people at the right time.
Given all of these uses, it makes sense to keep the communications infrastructure operating optimally—leveraging management and monitoring tools automate provisioning and administration to ensure fast-moving digital transformation initiatives won’t be stalled. Today, 46% of organizations use third-party administration management tools for UCC.
In doing so, they are able to reduce UCC operational costs by 31% and implementation costs by 65%. And, employee productivity increases by 21% when companies use administration management tools. When communications apps are running efficiently, employees can get their jobs done faster and better.
The bottom line: Digital transformation initiatives are high profile in most organizations, and they rely on a well-managed, feature-rich communications infrastructure to succeed. One of the best ways to ensure that communications infrastructure is nimble is by using administration management tools to automate provisioning and administration—making it easy to add new employees, locations, devices, and features to that vital part of the technology foundation.
