Written by: IDC Abner Germanow, Jonathan Edwards, Lee Doyle IDC believes the convergence of communications and mainstream IT architectures will drive significant innovation in business processes over the next decade.
W H I T E P AP E R T h e C h a n g i n g R o l e o f C o m m u n i c a t i o n s i n I T Ar c h i t e c t u r e : I m p l i c a t i o n s f o r C I O s , Ar c h i t e c t s , a n d D e v e l o p e r s Sponsored by: NEC Abner Germanow Jonathan Edwards Lee Doyle September 2009 mo I D C O P I N I O N c.cdi. Imagine your job is to review complex orders identified as abnormal within your www company's automated order processing system. Right now the screen on your order fulfillment system shows an order for 4,000 black widgets from Big Yellow Inc., one of 510 your best customers; however, you happen to know that Big Yellow Inc. historically 4.53 orders only yellow widgets. You decide to do a quick check with someone on the 9.8 sales team for Big Yellow Inc. to confirm whether the order was filled out properly. 05.F What follows is a series of phone calls, voice mails, instant messages, and emails to 002 find someone who knows the answer or can approve the transaction. Finding 8.27 someone to get even a small, but critical question answered quickly is often more 8.8 difficult than it could be. The order processing system knows which sales team 05. members were involved with the order, and the communications system should be P able to identify which of them are available and even the preferred communication ASU method to reach them. Taking the scenario another step forward, say that you have 10 access to searchable transcripts of all voice, video, and text interactions with Big 710 Yellow Inc. You could easily listen to the order request to hear whether there was an AM order for the black widgets; alternatively, you may see that a member of the sales ,m team is available and could be speaking to him within seconds. In either case, the ahg ability to add communication intelligence and capabilities to the order processing nim system could allow you to quickly resolve the issue. More broadly, integrated arF communication capabilities holds the potential to dramatically speed up a wide set of tee business processes. rtS nee The notion of real-time communications as an application distinct from traditional pS information technology practices is ending. IDC believes the convergence of 5 :s communications and mainstream IT architectures will drive significant innovation in retr business processes over the next decade. auqdaeH la I N T H I S W H I T E P AP E R bolG This white paper discusses:
` The evolution of communications, from proprietary technologies housed in separate organizations to software-based communications designed to be part of mainstream IT architectures.
` Examples of emerging business cases for treating communications in the same manner as other business applications.
` Options and migration paths available to companies looking to justify future communications investments.
` The experience of a professional business application development and integration company working with the NEC UNIVERGE Sphericall communications platform.
S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W I T & C o m m u n i c a t i o n s : W h a t ' s R e a l l y C h a n g i n g ?
Technology trends in mainstream IT architectures are focused on ways to optimize the business, using everything from virtualization technologies to services oriented architectures (SOAs) to create a more cost effective and agile IT infrastructure that ultimately creates a more competitive enterprise.
Modes of business communications are similarly in the midst of technological, political, and use case changes. In many cases, new communications capabilities are changing the way work is done: for example, communications tools based on mobile and remote access technologies have already begun to optimize where users are able to work.
Traditionally, business communications consisted entirely of voice calls that traversed proprietary networks with specialized systems managed by staff outside of the IT group. Over the last decade, with the advent of voice packetized to traverse data networks, this staff has largely moved into IT; however, despite this migration voice is still largely treated as a ... [download for more]
