BANGALORE, INDIA: Building business cases for unified communications (UC) based on cost savings has proven difficult. It is getting clearer that real benefit of UC comes from better interaction between company employees and from closer integration of communication and collaboration in a more efficient business process.

Claudio Castelli, senior analyst, Ovum, says: "As organisations become more globally dispersed, it is more difficult to maintain rich social connections between staff, customers and suppliers. Now that UC platforms are increasingly offering better tools, we should look more deeply at social character of enterprise. What motivates and de-motivates employees in an enterprise to behave collaboratively with their peers, customers and suppliers."

A range of factors might determine how "open" or "closed" a company is for collaboration, and therefore how receptive it is to UC path. Relevant factors include pressure to develop new products and services, customer/stakeholder intimacy, interrelatedness with other organisations, reliance on creative processes to solve novel problems, the culture of internal opportunity, reputation flexibility and data anonymity.

A traditional institution, with a very stable portfolio, tight internal process and centralised market communication potentially has less to gain from the use of UC solutions and much to lose if rigid security policies and controlling tools are not in place. On the other hand, a dynamic organisation, such as a company which business relies on a large number of staff providing customer services in the field, will get a lot of advantages from UC.

"Quick access to information and faster collaboration between specialists, including video and graphical sharing, can make a huge difference on its deliverables. It is also important to note that a social assessment looks at a company as a whole, but that use of UC might vary between departments."

There are also other important tools such as user profiling which help to identify departments (or even individuals) that will benefit most from UC and identify the most appropriate UC tools that they should have.