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How IBM positioned for business growth using integrated business communications.
The advent of IP-based communications supporting voice, video and data-known variously as "converged communications" or "unified communications"-ushers in a broad range of enhanced communications based on the convergence and integration of devices and networks. This shift can profoundly affect the way people live and work. And it can enable improvements in communications, collaboration, productivity, customer service and more-creating integrated business communications that can foster business advantages that far outweigh lowering the cost of a phone call.
Such transformation to integrated business communications is already happening inside IBM. This paper tells the story of how IBM is building one of the world's largest converged networks, the business and IT benefits IBM is realizing from convergence, and the benefits other companies may realize by following a similar model.
Most implementations of converged communications technology occur among midsize, large and very large enterprises-and are driven by events more specific than the impending retirement of traditional telephones. Such events can include a new or expanded building, the end of a lease for a PBX system or a lack of expandability in an existing PBX, the need to support an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce, the adoption of new video devices, or the need to ensure communication in the event of a natural or human-made disaster.
IBM met these triggering criteria-with its more than 1,500 buildings in more than 160 countries, some 900 PBX systems, 400,000 telephones, 160,000 cellular phones and a mobile workforce approaching 40 percent. But beyond its large, dispersed and increasingly mobile organization, IBM found itself a prime candidate for converged communications for three other key reasons.
Few organizations, for example, can survive today without communications that include data, voice and video capabilities of some variety. Whether employees pick up the phone to join a conference call, attach a document to an e-mail message, send a fax, transmit an image over the Internet or initiate an instant messaging (IM) session, most business activities and outcomes are enabled by communications, both formal and informal.
Beyond triggers: evolving the business
Since 2001, when it first began receiving requests for converged networks from its facilities around the world, IBM has observed an evolution in the reasons driving this communications change. In addition to cost reductions-always an abiding concern-more recent requests from IBM divisions have asked for increased and enhanced communications capabilities. The result is a pattern much like the model developed by Abraham Maslow to describe human development-once basic needs are met (in this case, cost reduction), it is possible to achieve more complex and sophisticated results.
Redirect current investments
The reasons for adopting integrated business communications reveal a hierarchy of needs - with fundamental needs at the bottom that must be satisfied before the higher needs can be addressed. At higher levels, the business case for convergence becomes increasingly compelling.
Converged communications applications: At this stage, stand-alone voice, video and data communications applications are integrated into converged applications. This stage is typically driven by the need to increase employee productivity.
Integrated business communications: At this stage, business processes and workflows are modified to take advantage of converged communications applications. Integrated business communications can help create innovative new business models, new methods of communication and information flows to provide business leadership.
Time
IBM has identified three distinct phases in the adoption and related benefits of integrated business communications, from technology and function to higher-level business benefits.
For many organizations, converged networks have already reduced the overall maintenance and management costs associated with conventional communications. This includes freeing telephones from their physical locations to simplify moves, adds and changes (MACs)-because in an IP-based environment, a telephone is simply plugged in to any Ethernet connection. Integrated business communications, however, delivers benefits that are higher on the value chain. It is helping organizations improve employee productivity by providing powerful collaborative applications that can be used across a range of devices, including PCs, televisions, cellular phones, softphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and more. It is helping them increase customer satisfaction by enhancing the speed and quality of contact center response. And for many, it is integrating supply chain processes so that vendors and customers can gain fast and efficient access to order status, inventory, store location and payment history.
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