Tipsheet: Achieving Success When Transitioning to the Next Great Enterprise Communications Innovation

Moussa Zaghdoud

September 14, 2017

In our blog here, we've been exploring the evolution of enterprise communications and the trends that have influenced change throughout the years.

Sadly, our time on this blog series is now coming to a close as we round out the series with a look at what it takes to have a successful transition when implementing new enterprise communications technologies.

The time we spent working with independent market research firm Wainhouse Research this year to gain a deeper understanding of market trends has helped us perfect our Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow™ cloud-based relationship management platform and we’re happy to share some of that insight here.

Though there has been rapid innovation throughout the history of enterprise communications, especially even just over the past decade, a report from Wainhouse found that “most organizations find themselves somewhere between the legacy world of on-premises, silo’d communications, and unified, cloud-based services.”

For enterprises hoping to make the transition to the next great technology, we’ve learned from examples of the early adopters and have compiled this list of tips for a successful transition.

• Engage the business. First and foremost, you’ll need to engage with the executives and may also want to engage the user community, which can reduce support costs and increase user adoption. However, you’ll want to find a balance between too little or too much involvement in order to limit debates and delays.

• Unify the user experience. Unifying silo’d communications and reducing the friction between services ultimately drives more utilization from more people. This can be done in one of two ways, either by positioning a unified platform as the key to the unified experience or by implementing a hybrid platform that provides a unified application, but integrates with existing communications infrastructure. Both paths have their own pros and cons (more on those in the official report).

• Get in front of the barriers. The top three barriers preventing enterprises from deploying or expanding UC solutions include internal politics, business case confusion and network concerns. Internal politics we covered briefly in an earlier blog, learning that inclusion of others can open the technology to debate or delays. Business case confusion relates to how difficult it can be to quantify expected returns. And network concerns come from discovering whether you have a technically current and properly sized network, or a network built for just email and content sharing – a proper assessment is a critical step prior to deploying new digital communications.

• Leverage your developers. Whether you are looking to integrate off-the-shelf UC solutions into existing business applications (CRM, ERP, etc.), or create net new UC tools with a CPaaS partner, your developers can provide a new return on their investment when applied broadly within your enterprise.

There’s so much happening in enterprise communications today, including rapid technology change along with constrained budgets, so the responsibility to support an enterprise in transition can be difficult. The struggle is real! Our hope is that this blog series has provided some of the necessary insights to help enterprises make an informed decision and achieve success when implementing the next great innovation.

Be sure to download the full Wainhouse Research report here and visit our previous blog posts on the history of enterprise communications, key technology trends and key business trends.