Building blocks of a Unified Communications deployment – part 1

There are a number, more accurately ‘a significant number’, of buildings blocks that must exist or be catered for when building a UC strategy. This article is meant to be a high level view of such necessary things.

Because my background is technical, I may tend to be more focused on the technical aspects of unified communications, but other non-technical aspects are at least as important for a successful deployment of any challenging complex solution such as UC.

From a technical aspect, there is a myriad of little things and many big things that must line up to bring the expected outcome to reality. These are:
- the WAN
- a DNS infrastructure
- a corporate directory
- a database infrastructure
- an email infrastructure (corporate messaging suite)
- interfaces with the PSTN cloud, existing PABX and existing video conferencing infrastructure
- interface with the mobile phones
- add the UC infrastructure
- monitoring

From a non-technical aspect, a corporation must be in a position to reorganise itself to face the new technical realities (within IT) and to sell the new service and benefits to the users within the company. The company must also reorganise different departments in order to maximise return on investment. The activities that must occur:
- there must be buy-in from as high a level as possible within the corporation. Such sponsorship should at the very least come from the CIO, if not the CEO and CFO
- the new technologies require a reorganisation around the new technologies so as to attract the proper skillset. Required skillsets often overlap with other traditional skillsets
- the corporate restructuring must occur within customer facing teams (including a/r, customer support, marketing, sales) and others (such as a/p)
- an education of the user base in order to train in the usage of the technology and change the culture and mindset around communication
- call accounting (extension level billing) should be used in order to charge back the costs
- adequate reporting should be available to all levels (IT, management and executive)

In a next article we will try to go more into the detail of certain aspects.

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Tags: LinkedIn, uc, uc strategy, unified, unified communications