|
This report looks at the degree to which today’s UK businesses adequately manage their total telecommunications expenditure—including fixed line and mobile telephony and external data communications—and where good practice is lacking.
It is intended to be read by those who carry out this task in their own organization, and those who are looking to see how to get the best value out of telecommunications right across their business, rather than it simply being seen as a cost.
The research behind this report involved interviews with 120 UK-based senior managers with operational or commercial responsibility for telecommunications in organizations with annual total telecoms budgets of over £250,000.
Quocirca would like to thank all the participants for their time to take part in the telephone interviews from which the data for this research was derived. Without their participation such reports would not be possible.
The inexorable rise of usage
The use of sophisticated information technology has spread from smallish numbers of isolated powerful computers to pervasive information and access to applications almost anywhere through open and interoperable standards. At the same time, telecommunications capabilities have grown in speed, capacity and reach, including high bandwidth fixed and low cost mobile networks, bringing voice and data communications everywhere.
The IT and telecoms industries have ‘collided’ with a convergence around open standards, and this has increased the avail-ability and use of technology for both consumer and business purposes. Each feed off the other. Where once the business world led with concepts that then emerged into the consumer marketplace, now the reverse is more often true. All this makes the business of managing an organization’s communications needs—voice, data, fixed, mobile—more complex as a whole set of different technologies merge.
Depending on their job role, many employees have come to expect to use some form of mobile or remote access device—phone and/or laptop—and some form of network connection. Whether provided by the employee or the business, the mobile phone has become an important part of many people’s lives and has become a very useful business tool. Also the number of mobile users continues to grow (Figure 1).
The initially simple proposition of providing a mobile phone on a corporate tariff is now more complex as individuals have their own personal preferences, styles and usage criteria for mobile phones. The business-supplied mobile phone has also at times necessitated a more intricate sharing of costs between employee, employer and taxman as the line between personal and work use blurs.
Remote access to IT increases this complexity. Whilst remote working once might have involved a hotel network connection for a road warrior’s laptop to dial in to read email, it is now far more likely to encompass other, faster forms of connection and other locations, in particular the home (Figure 2).
This further blurs the divide between personal and business use, especially if an employee is regularly expected to work in diverse locations, whilst still remaining in an environment controlled and secured by the IT department. The remote employee might be using other business-critical applications in addition to email, or they may be using IP telephony bridged into the corporate PBX to appear like any other extension, even when working from home, therefore increasing the need for quality and security controls.
Even within the office there are new applications to make further use of the available communications facilities, and to enhance the simpler methods of communication, such as basic phone calls or text-based email messages with richer content and increased interactivity. This is, in part, also driven by the needs and requests of end users (Figure 3).
All sorts of collaborative tools are used by consumers for social interaction, either by phoning or texting their friends and family via a mobile phone or sharing photographs and videos on the internet with increasingly large social groupings of ‘friends’ and network contacts. This widespread use makes it inevitable that these consumer-friendly technologies will also move into the workplace (Figure 4).
As they do, the communications managers in every organization will be faced with more users, mechanisms and messages clamoring for capacity in the network.
|
