Computerworld -
In the space of just a few years, Art Johnston has gone from thinking of unified communications as optional to viewing it as "a strategy that we need to implement to be competitive."
As CIO at Argo Turboserve Corp. (ATC), a Lyndhurst, N.J.-based company that provides customized supply chain management and nuclear engineering services, Johnston understands the importance of ensuring that a company's employees are able to access all their communications tools at any time, from any place.
"Our value-add to customers is in getting them immediate responses, solutions and answers," he explains. "The one thing we don't want to have is 'We'll get back to you' as an answer."
To continue reading, register here to become an Insider
It's FREE to join
Computerworld - In the space of just a few years, Art Johnston has gone from thinking of unified communications as optional to viewing it as "a strategy that we need to implement to be competitive."
As CIO at Argo Turboserve Corp. (ATC), a Lyndhurst, N.J.-based company that provides customized supply chain management and nuclear engineering services, Johnston understands the importance of ensuring that a company's employees are able to access all their communications tools at any time, from any place.
"Our value-add to customers is in getting them immediate responses, solutions and answers," he explains. "The one thing we don't want to have is 'We'll get back to you' as an answer."
Establishing integrated, always-there communications is a tall order, considering that about half of ATC's 200 employees conduct most of their business on smartphones and tablets.
That's where unified communications comes into play.
UC brings together all of the disparate pieces of hardware and software tools that people use to stay connected -- from old-fashioned telephones to mobile video chat -- and makes those channels available anytime, anywhere, from any device.
"The idea is that all of that -- all that different kind of communications -- exists in a single interface," explains Melanie Turek, an analyst at IT research firm Frost & Sullivan.
In a perfect UC environment, an employee could receive a call on his mobile phone from someone who dialed his office line; or he could join a webconference from his laptop, access voicemail from a desktop at a satellite office and use an online "presence" application to see if a colleague is available to answer a question. And he could do all of that using a single, easy-to-navigate set of tools accessible on any and all devices.
That's the ideal Johnston is after as he makes his final choice of platform, which should be in place by midyear for most of ATC's salesforce and engineering team.
That day can't come fast enough, as far as Johnston is concerned. Unified communications "is not just a 'nice to have.' This is very important for our company to have as we go out and work with our customers and partners," he says.
Unified Communications
Tricky ROI
Though IT leaders consistently list unified communications as a priority, it remains on the back burner at many organizations. One reason: ROI for UC tends to be measured in productivity improvements and other strategic advantages, rather than hard numbers that come from cost savings.
And for some companies, that can be a problem. "Everyone understands that [unified communications] would be valuable, but showing that it's valuable enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get all of this to work together? That's difficult," says Frost & Sullivan analyst Melanie Turek.
IT leaders often find it easier to demonstrate the value of pieces of the UC puzzle, says Turek. They can, for example, justify investments in instant messaging by showing the importance of knowing the availability of people in different locations. But they have a harder time showing the potential ROI of investments necessary to pull all of the pieces together.
Yet companies that actually tie the pieces together are the ones that can maximize the value of unified communications -- provided they're able to change the processes that the technologies support, says Tim Herbert, vice president of research at CompTIA.
"It's about rethinking the norms for communications and having the policies that support [those changes]," he says. "A lot of companies deploy unified communications, but if they don't take advantage of things like presence technology or sharing documents other than email attachments, then they aren't going to see the full benefits of UC."
— Mary K. Pratt
You are previewing premium content. 
Free Insider Guide
