A couple of reports have come out recently that have looked at the prospects of unified communications (UC). The studies seem to indicate that enterprises are moving towards UC adoption on the whole to cut operating costs, and that this drive is also encouraging the uptake of cloud-based UC solutions.

First is the second annual Unified Communications Tracking Poll from technology vendor CDW, published in March 2010. It surveyed 915 IT professionals in the US with the responsibility for UC in business, government, healthcare and education. The full report can be found here. CDW found that of organizations it surveyed:

·         8% had fully implemented UC - steady from previous 2009;

·         67% had a business case or strategic plan for UC adoption - up from 55%;

·         58% have deployed unified messaging - up from 46%

·         45% have deployed presence technology - up from to 37%

Crucially, of the organizations that have fully implemented UC, 71% say that return on investment (ROI) has met or exceeded their expectations. Reducing operating costs was seen as the top benefit of UC (54%), followed by increased productivity (50%) and more reliable communication (44%).

"IT executives report that economic pressures were a greater concern in 2009 than in 2008, but for many, the return on investment from UC deployments is so compelling that they ask, 'Why wouldn't we do this?'" said Pat Scheckel, vice president of converged infrastructure solutions at CDW. "The result is reduced costs, increased productivity and improved decision making - benefits that resonate across every industry, especially in a recessionary economy."

Also in March, a new report from Frost and Sullivan looked at the adoption of cloud-based UC services in Europe. It says that the recessionary impact is convincing enterprises to look at new ways of deploying UC, and that cloud is emerging as a real contender. It finds that the cloud-based US market earned revenues of €46.9 million in 2009 and estimates this to reach €1.6 billion in 2014 - a growth rate of 79%.

Frost points out that the concept of hosted enterprise communications services has gained mainstream acceptance in recent years as modern communications have become increasingly more sophisticated. Additionally, during the economic downturn, rising costs and a fall in the availability of capital are favouring OPEX-based solutions.

"Down economy favouring OPEX-based solutions coupled with market's need for flexibility and focus on core competencies, all boost cloud-based UC services adoption," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Dorota Oviedo. "Both small businesses and large enterprises are interested in communications delivered as a service."

Here are some tracks to follow to avoid confusing a good idea with a sound project..

A non aligned idea or one that does not find anchor points with the strategy of the company will be much more difficult to sell and to turn into a project. It will miss a contextual frame to which executive management can refer to understand the positioning and the relevance of the idea, and then make the decision to launch or not the project. Despite the fact that breakthrough and innovative ideas (those that make or unmake the success of companies) often encounter such issue which they have to overcome to get to the project stage.

Concrete and quantified objectives

To speak about project, it will be necessary to us to define SMART objectives. Thus: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound.

Customers and Sponsors

Have we already identified customers who are firmly interested in this new product or service? Who are they? Would they be ready to jointly finance the development if we offered them this possibility? What sponsors are really going to wet their shirt to support and promote this project? What advantages are they going to get from it?

Return on investment

The idea can be attractive and offer strong potential of additional revenue, costs reduction or productivity increase. And, the idea does not cost much. On the other hand, the project holds very significant costs and its first evaluation must be as realistic as possible to start on good bases. It is of no use to present important profits and minimize the investment to reach this objective. Also, you have to do a thorough job but avoid spending too many efforts on this first sketch of realistic return on investment (ROI) on projects as many should fail the launch stage if you have enough innovative ideas. For example, it could be due to a weak ROI, or a break even point too far away to be attractive for the company. It is necessary to choose only the very best of your good ideas.

Definition of the scope

The idea is prone to evolve, to grow richer, to expand... The project must be well scoped to define its deliverables, timeline, and costs. It will not prevent it from evolving over time in later versions of the product/service. And these later versions will be new projects with their own well defined deliverables, timeline and costs. This scoping needs to identify the critical contents without which the project would loose its core value. Therefore, concentrate on what will make the success of the product or service, not the bells and whistles and other interesting good additional ideas.

Operational, strategic and competitive necessity: impact not to do this project

Also called the "do nothing" scenario. To better sell the idea and transform it into an approved project, it is always interesting to calculate the impacts not to do this project. It maybe a loss of market shares, to stagnate on a level of productivity which does not allow you to increase sales, not to be in position to maintain margins while the situation requires it. If possible, calculate and express it in simple terms: "every day without this new IT application in the company is costing us xK euros", or "without this new service or product, our competitor X continues to eat Y% of market shares each and every month".

Completion conditions

A project, unlike an idea, has clear start and end dates. To make sure of this clarity, it is not useless to ask some basic questions prior to launching it: when will the project be complete? How will we know we've reached that point? What simple and indisputable measures will we use to determine the end? It may be the production use of a new system, the signed off product acceptance, the end of a validation pilot, the last site connected during the deployment of a network.

Conditions of stop before the end

Although we have no intent to fail, it can happen. And, if this occurs, it better be noticed it as soon as possible. Thus, think before the start about the conditions which could justify stopping the project before its end. It is neither about pessimism nor defeatism. It is important to clarify these conditions to eliminate surprises. They can be linked to the project itself: delays, cost overruns, quality problems, human problems... or more external to the project team: a rival product or a new entrant which modifies significantly the market, a legal or economic context which evolves and makes our product or service far less attractive or much easier to copy for competitors...

I hope that these modest advices will help you raise to yourself some useful questions and prepare you to transform your promising ideas into concrete projects!

At the end of February, I had the pleasure of attending one of the more vibrant and collaborative social media events that I have been to. The Likeminds conference, held in Exeter in the UK, is an interesting mix of enterprises using social media, leading practitioners such as Chris Brogan, Trey Pennington and Olivier Blanchard, and a number of local businesses and public sector organizations. Orange Business Services' own Yann Gourvennec was a keynote speaker: a video of his presentation can be found here. You can find an array of videos, blog posts and musings from the event here. 

There was a great deal of discussion on how companies are adopting social media, and the challenges of bedding the technologies into working practices. Other talking points centers on brand reputation, motivating internal contributors, whether a brand can be sincere and whether tools are coming before process.

So why isn't social media joined up with business processes? May be because people started with the tools first and thought about what to do with them afterwards.

This was a point well made by Oliver Blanchard who discussed the evolution of social media in the enterprise, and how organizations were struggling to marry strategy and tactics. His belief is that companies need to focus more on enablement of social media and business process, rather than endless strategizing.

Blanchard shared with us his own experience of how social media is not joined up: when he tweeted that a shop had poor customer service, it was quickly picked up by those responsible for monitoring the company's online reputation. They tried to contact the store manager to respond to the customer (who was still in the shop), but to no avail. There were no processes within the organization for joining up social media to the outlets.

This illustrates that many organizations listen to what is said about them in the social media, particularly Twitter, but as yet have not incorporated social media into marketing, PR, product development, customer service, help desks and so on. Collating reputation or buzz measurements is just the start of the journey that companies need to go through.

When I visit conferences, I talk to people who say they've been asked to create a Facebook page, or a Twitter account by their boss, but it stands alone, detached. This is completely the wrong approach to social media. You need to start with what you want to accomplish, then identify how to change processes to achieve this and finally you can address the issue of which tools to use.  If you simply produce content that no-one cares about, your online presence is worthless.

Just to emphasize why listening and contributing to social media is important, Chris Brogan had a valuable point to make. Customers wanted to be loved. They may use social media to praise their favourite brand, or occasionally to moan but ultimately, like a small child playing hide and seek, they want to be wanted. So it's important that companies don't just listen to their customers complaints and feedback (their reputation), but that they do something about it.

Madlen Nicolaus, social media manager EAMER at Kodak shared a good example with the Likeminds attendees. The launch of the Kodak Zi8 portable HD camera was greeted enthusiastically - in fact, bloggers love them  - but listening to social media revealed that a couple of product features were not ideal, and that many people felt uninspired by the name. By listening and feeding back into product manager, Kodak has now been able to develop a second generation, with the new features identified in social media, and a new name voted by crowd sourcing users.