Communications
Communications are outdated, says survey
29 April 2008
The communications architecture that has evolved over the last 20 years no longer meets the requirements of organisations, according to research firm Butler Group.
A new report from the company says that organisations are moving from traditional ‘command and control’ hierarchies looser structures based on collaboration and teamwork, and that there is a fundamental shift from one-to-one to many-to-many communication. The report Communications and Collaboration – Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility identifies that organisations are beginning to expand outside the traditional boundaries found in the past. The extended enterprise now requires a common IP-based infrastructure to capitalise on information mobility and the need to be more flexible. There is a requirement for greater location independence, with remote working becoming more popular and many employees no longer remaining in one place for any great length of time. In order for this flexibility and changes in work practices to be catered for it is becoming apparent that the existing separate siloed infrastructures are no longer the answer.
“The need for new and enhanced service provision to support business requirements must drive infrastructure and technology deployment. A services-based approach is best suited to this environment to insulate developers and users from the complexity of the infrastructure, and to ease the integration of the different systems and communication mechanisms. There should be a move towards the provision of common integrated communication services, which are ideal for catering for a complex and distributed environment,” says Mark Blowers, Butler’s enterprise architectures practice director and co-author of the study.
“Moving away from proprietary solutions for voice and data to a horizontal communications architecture will enable the communications environment to be broken down into separate layers, making use of industry standards to integrate the hardware, common services, and administration elements. This componentisation and services-based approach increases flexibility, enabling services to be developed independent of the equipment. Using IP-based components instead of vendor-dependent solutions improves scalability, along with driving down infrastructure costs with price/performance optimisation.”
“Communications play an important role in ensuring businesses function efficiently. It is therefore vital for systems to be effective and easy to use. Enterprises are concerned with both employee and customer satisfaction when deploying communication technologies and are looking to improve productivity through their IP and unified communications investments”, continues Blowers.
“There is pressure on the IT manager to provide enterprise presence functionality due to the availability of consumer instant messaging. Social networking techniques and Web 2.0 functionality used in the consumer environment will be demanded by the enterprise workforce, which will come to expect these new tools and technologies to be readily available at any location, as well as being able to use any device.”
Effective management is a key capability in the unified environment where policies must drive availability, and visibility moves from individual point solutions to being system wide, along with the shift from fixed asset administration to dynamic asset utilisation. A cornerstone for the provision of multi-modal channels is the ability to deliver intelligent central performance management, enabling efficient use of the available resources. The accessibility of end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) supporting data, voice, and multimedia, is an important first step in the evolution towards an automated solution.
Blowers concludes: “Many communication and collaboration strategies are primarily initiated to reap the benefits of infrastructure consolidation, such as reductions in operational costs, and to improve levels of service quality. However, although these are useful goals, the real value afforded by unified communications and collaboration solutions ultimately arises from improvements to business processes, enhancement of stakeholder interactions, the optimisation of workflow, and driving innovation in the business.”