Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War

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1 For: Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War by Art Schoeller, November 10, 2014 Key Takeaways A CCI Framework Succeeds When Peers Collaborate Large IT organizations are split by specialty, so they don t view CCI as a united common goal. Too many CCI skill sets with competing viewpoints lead to a broken system. IT leaders need to induce workers to see the benefits of working together. Failure To Build A Comprehensive CCI Framework Can Hinder Operations Proceeding with a less than perfect CCI road map can lead to disaster. The failure of IT to provide a quality user experience will lead workers to take advantage of technology consumerization and seek alternatives. This will cause both monetary and business process repercussions. Move Forward With All Parties Working Toward The Same End To avoid pitfalls and headaches, ensure that all I&O professionals in a large IT organization understand the single CCI goal they re working toward. You must emphasize the many benefits that all aspects of I&O can get out of a strong CCI system and rally the many sides of the civil war under the common banner of CCI. Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA USA Tel: Fax:

2 November 10, 2014 Why Read This Report Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War Organization: The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Playbook by Art Schoeller with Christopher Voce and Victoria Boutan In the American Civil War, many combatants on both sides had attended the US Military Academy at West Point as cadets. The war pitted not only brother against brother but also cadet against cadet, with disastrous results. Similarly, many IT organizations are at war against each other in trying to plot out a coordinated strategy and road map for communications and collaboration infrastructure (CCI). The end result is a fractured set of investments and CCI user experience and limited user adoption in the enterprise. While unified communications software is on the move to more tightly integrated suites, the introduction of social networking capabilities has added complexity to infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals overall CCI architecture. It s time for infrastructure and operations executives to resolve the CCI civil war, drive better ROI, and foster broader CCI adoption. This document highlights the various skill camps that are battling in this CCI war and provides a simple checklist to help get everyone marching toward a unified CCI strategy and road map. This report was originally published on July 25, 2013; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. Table Of Contents Skill Camps Within The IT Organization Drive A Less Optimal CCI Road Map A Fractured CCI Road Map Strategy And Deployment Lead To Six Risks Proper Governance Can Prevent The Civil War Implement An I&O Checklist To Drive CCI Success recommendations Bring The IT Team Together With A Common Road Map And Vision For CCI Notes & Resources Forrester interviewed five vendor and user companies, including Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Dimension Data, and Verizon, and gathered information from many inquiries. Related Research Documents Reduce Risk And Drive Adoption With A CCI Road Map May 29, 2013 Avoid Tactical, Narrow Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Strategies January 18, Supplemental Material 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please clientsupport@forrester.com. For additional information, go to

3 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 2 Skill Camps Within The It Organization Drive A Less Optimal Cci Road Map In most large IT organizations, I&O professionals are segregated by capabilities, so there s no one place that pulls together a comprehensive CCI road map and strategy. Like the parable of the blind men each feeling a different part of the elephant and thus disagreeing on what an elephant is, they bring to the table their own particular biases and views on which capabilities are critical. I&O teams have had challenges working with their enterprise architects because of these diverse views but also because of the historical split in CCI that drove more best-of-breed purchases. This fractured approach is difficult to integrate into a solid, unified road map and strategy. The result? I&O gets stuck in the middle of an IT civil war. There are multiple warring factions, based on their particular IT function and skill set. These skill camps also align with unified communications (UC) vendors whose capabilities fit in with their particular part of the IT service catalog. We see six players in this civil war: Telecommunications departments favor IP telephony features. While the migration to voice over IP (VoIP) has moved many traditional voice professionals closer to data networking, there remains a difference in their view of which CCI functions are key. Choosing traditional private branch exchange (PBX) features, call centers, voic , and physical phones is critical and needs to be well thought through. For many enterprises, the most explicit hard-dollar justification for UC comes from the transition of traditional voice services to the enterprise WAN, which places a higher emphasis on these capabilities, but it can be at the expense of other CCI capabilities. 1 Because of the historic strength of vendors that are driving the VoIP transition, these professionals will generally align more with Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Siemens, and more PBX-oriented vendors. Data networking teams emphasize management of real-time media streams. The quality of service for voice and video on IP networks requires data networking professionals to reengineer not only the corporate WAN but also the performance of connections in and out of carrier networks. Their focus will be on which tools, protocols, and equipment can best segment, prioritize, and monitor these streams. The data networking team aligns with Cisco because of its dominance in enterprise network infrastructure. Facilities managers are concerned with conference room design and operation. Deploying formal videoconferencing entails a lot of physical room design, including deployment of cameras, microphones, large monitors, and the ongoing management of these assets. As a result, facilities management often drives the deployment of videoconferencing and telepresence. This team strongly prefers the videoconference room experience and manageability of Avaya/ Radvision, Cisco, and Polycom. Collaboration pros look at integration of CCI with collaboration and social networking. You can add unified communications to team portals and social activity streams to allow real-time sharing and editing of documents. This ease of collaborating in real time using voice, video, IM,

4 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 3 and document sharing boosts knowledge-worker productivity but places a high premium on the seamless integration of these functions. For many IT organizations, the functions of and instant messaging also fall to the collaboration team. These teams often align with IBM, Google, and Microsoft because of this emphasis on collaboration functionality. Application developers are concerned with integrating CCI into enterprise business processes. Application developers creating code that monitors real-time key performance indicators is an example of CCI integration: When a key performance indicator hits a certain threshold, a notification is sent to key stakeholders who then join a voice- or videoconference to resolve the problem. Presence information can be used to identify which team members are available and what the best method is to reach them (e.g., mobile phone or desktop softphone). Thus, the application development team emphasizes UC application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), and determines whether the vendor aligns with its enterprise applications platform strategy, such as Java or.net. For this set of functions, the more likely vendors for alignment are IBM and Microsoft. In addition, applications vendors such as salesforce.com are incorporating CCI capabilities into their packaged applications, further expanding the choices for I&O professionals. End users are deploying their own CCI capabilities due to the consumerization of IT. While the end user community doesn t formally reside in IT and drive the road map, its influence is growing because many CCI capabilities are readily available. Users who travel extensively use Skype to make free calls and avoid international roaming charges. Groups that want easy webconferencing to collaborate with external partners use GoToMeeting. Social networking and file exchange are readily available from vendors such as Yammer and Dropbox. This community will be strongly biased toward free, easy-to-deploy, and well-known cloud services and products. A Fractured Cci Road Map Strategy And Deployment Lead To Six Risks The supply side of the industry is increasingly moving to a suite of capabilities versus best-of-breed components. The growing option of communications-as-a-service (CaaS) is helping to accelerate this trend. 2 But due to the need to write down existing UC assets and the lack of coordination within IT, I&O teams run the risk of providing less than optimal services at higher costs. The UC civil war leads to six primary risks (see Figure 1): A fractured CCI user experience. Each vendor in the CCI space has an approach to integrating with competing platforms, such as integration of Cisco s CUCILync with Microsoft. But the more diverse the enterprise CCI stack becomes, the more limited and complex the user experience becomes. Since CCI capabilities are not mandated, users can ignore the technology deployed by I&O on a whim if they feel it s not easily accessed or meeting their needs. Overcoming the information-worker muscle memory of current tools is already a challenge, and a diverse user experience makes it almost impossible.

5 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 4 Multiple, disparate management consoles. Not synchronizing the CCI road map will result in a proliferation of session initiation protocol (SIP) session managers, each with their own associated management system, parameters to configure, and integration points into the rest of the enterprise architecture. This is especially acute when operations managers have to diagnose real-time voice and video traffic quality-of-service (QoS) issues that are managed by different platforms. An oversupply and overlap of CCI capabilities. Enterprises that don t settle the civil war end up making separate purchases of collaboration, social networking, IM, voice, video, and conferencing systems that now have overlapping capabilities. So from a hardware purchase and software licensing perspective, they re buying the same capability multiple times from different vendors (e.g., using Cisco WebEx cloud conferencing while deploying Microsoft Lync with a full enterprise client access license [CAL] for IM). Both solutions have full webconferencing capabilities and introduce multiple choices for users. Too many cross-vendor integration points. The greater the number of vendors that exist in the enterprise CCI stack, the more integration points are required to bring them together. While the reality is that enterprises will not suddenly flip to a suite approach and rip everything out, they do need to reduce the number of integration points of pain. Increased security vulnerabilities. UC means moving all real-time communications to IP, using SIP as the standard to set up and tear down sessions between users. The increased risk due to these real-time streams running over IP is a known problem, and security solutions are sensitive as to which UC platform they protect. Having more systems running UC in the enterprise increases this complexity and risk. Managing multiple approaches to document sharing means more points of risk to compromise sensitive enterprise data. Multiple IM systems that support file exchange can expose these files to unaudited exchanges with external parties. Reduced ability to engage key CCI champions in the business. If I&O isn t organized, the resulting lack of a sound strategy and road map limits its ability to discover and engage key collaboration champions in the business units that would help drive CCI adoption.

6 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 5 Figure 1 The CCI Civil War Leads To Six Skill Camps Introducing Six CCI Risks Data network, LAN/WAN Telecom, PBX, carrier services App development, CCI integration Fractured user experience Multiple management consoles Oversupply of CCI capabilities Multiple integration points Increased security risk Reduced ability to engage users Facilities, videoconferencing Collaboration portals, , IM End users Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution prohibited.

7 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 6 Proper Governance Can Prevent The Civil War An informed organizational design requires that CIOs look closely at span of control, alignment of function, and many other factors in determining their reporting structures. To prevent the fog of war coming into play when managing CCI, they should look across all the historically disparate capabilities and start to align them under a common governance structure. The ideal approach is to assign this to a director-level position, but for many this might not be possible in the current climate of your organization (see Figure 2). Full-scale reorganization under a common director is not a requirement to drive CCI. However, it s important to resource and charter a team where: Enterprise architects guide the CCI road map. Capturing the right information, such as the current CCI architecture state, IT stakeholder inputs, and CCI users inputs, can ensure success. The enterprise architect (EA) must evaluate the consumer technologies currently in use, such as Skype and Dropbox, to ensure that these technologies are accommodated, or provide alternative solutions such as Cisco Jabber and SharePoint to support user needs. These steps, coupled with proper business case development based on business stakeholders input on how CCI technology can help their employees, will help drive deeper adoption. Without this level of coordination across the full spectrum of CCI, there is a fracturing of the road map and architecture. A large US federal government agency s EA didn t have the flexibility he needed to establish a vision, as the outsourcing agreements managed by the agency included design and choice of vendors for technology. This compromised the enterprise architect s ability to drive the CCI road map because it was being driven by the outsourcing vendors operating within their contracted responsibilities. When the time came to lay out the future road map for CCI, this structure introduced conflict between the outsourcer managing the desktop tower, who was recommending Microsoft, and the company managing the network tower, who was favoring Cisco. To date, this issue is still unresolved and is causing delays in the agency moving forward with a coordinated CCI strategy and road map. A PMO helps drive adoption and change management. Driving adoption is the biggest challenge with CCI. Project management office (PMO) professionals are skilled in deployment and change management, so this is a natural place to resource CCI training and adoption. Identifying key user groups that can derive business value from CCI is a challenge, but without it, no one will take ownership. Voice and networking teams create a joint support plan. Moving video and voice to IP networks is relatively mature, but there are still instances where the link between voice and network teams is broken. These roles need to agree on how to coordinate IP address management, VLANs, physical wiring changes, Power over Ethernet (PoE), and closet switches. In addition, they need to come to agreement on common tools and troubleshooting procedures instead of having multiple sources of the truth.

8 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 7 A gap between the two roles hurt a large insurance company: One-third of the way through its deployment of VoIP, it experienced a number of outages due to lack of coordination. Phones in HQ s executive offices shut down, and it took four hours to determine why. The networking team had repurposed a VLAN for other applications, unaware that it supported these phones. CCI apps specialists form a CoE that delivers application development support. Business users can take on developing collaborative applications, but without the proper guidance, designs can be less than optimal and stress the overall infrastructure. More applications will begin to incorporate real-time communications as well as better manage the flow of work in the enterprise. It s important to factor application requirements into the design of CCI and best practices into the applications themselves. This center of excellence (CoE) need not be a standalone group, but a sufficiently resourced set of applications specialists (e.g., collaboration portal development, UC integration specialty) available to guide business teams. Security and risk teams embed their discipline into the design. Boosting enterprise collaboration capabilities is the goal of CCI, but it also needs to adhere to security guidelines for real-time communications and content. This is not something to engineer in after the fact. A large property, casualty, and wealth management firm baked regulatory impact into its design: The company began using video to more deeply engage high-net-worth customers. Not only were wealth managers conversing via video with clients, but they were also sharing detailed portfolio analysis via webconferencing. Though these communications did not fall under any current compliance regulations, the team wanted to architect its CCI to provide for recording those sessions in the future.

9 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 8 Figure 2 The Scope Of A CCI Director The CCI director gives employees secure, reliable access to the data, applications, and people they need anywhere, anytime, and on a variety of devices. Category Clients and endpoints Description Unified clients enable access to multiple communication and collaboration functions from a consistent interface. These may have different forms, including thick desktop clients, thin browser clients, mobile PDA clients, tablets, as well as specialized clients embedded within business applications. Technologies PC desktop client for UC, social networking, and collaboration softphones, SIP phones and wireless phones, smartphones and mobile devices, videoconferencing units Telephony and video Includes fixed, mobile, and soft telephony, as well as the evolution of PBXes and IP-PBXes. Video communications, both desktop and videoconferencing rooms. Voice telephony Video telephony Conferencing Messaging Presence and IM Communicationsenabled business processes (CEBPs) Collaboration and social software Includes separate voice, videoconferencing, and webconferencing capabilities, as well as converged unified conferencing capabilities Includes , voic , SMS, and UM in various forms Aggregation and publication of presence and location information from and to multiple sources also known as rich presence Business applications are integrated with communication applications. Key application areas include consolidated administration tools, collaboration applications, CRM, contact center applications, and notification applications. Eventually, other applications will be communication-enabled. Software to allow teams to create and share documents, rate their effectiveness, monitor and participate in social activity streams, and find experts using skill profiles Audioconferencing Webconferencing Videoconferencing and telepresence Integrated or unified or webconferencing All associated bridging infrastructure or carrier service Voic Unified messaging SMS, MMS, and text messaging Mobile Presence and rich presence IM Mobile IM/presence Mobile applications Notification applications Office productivity software (e.g., Microsoft Office or Google Docs) Expert locator applications CEBP tools Enterprise social networking software Team portals Wikis, blogs, social profiles, voting Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution prohibited.

10 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 9 Implement An I&O Checklist To Drive Cci Success Getting everyone on the same page within the IT organization is critical to the enterprise deriving the maximum value from CCI. As with any good I&O project, it s important to engage the business units in evaluating needs, establishing enterprise value and ROI, managing a cost-effective deployment, and driving end user adoption. To ensure success, use Forrester s CCI checklist and follow seven high-level tasks required to drive a unified strategy in the enterprise (see Figure 3). Figure 3 A Simple CCI Checklist Ensures A More Integrated CCI Strategy Task Assign a CCI project team. Description Recruit both IT and business-unit stakeholders. Ensure that at least three of the six camps are represented, especially those with near-term projects. Develop a shared set of metrics to measure success, such as percentage of user adoption, schedule for deployment, and ROI models. Assess current CCI technology inventory. Incorporate all CCI capability systems or cloud services. Document hardware depreciation, software license, and cloud or carrier service contract renewal time frames. Include all consumer capabilities, such as Skype, Yammer, and Dropbox. Assess current CCI skill sets. Build a CCI systems management strategy. Conduct workforce segmentation. Build a CCI road map. Recruit collaboration champions. Document all existing CCI infrastructure and operations support personnel. Document all IT organization certifications for CCI capabilities. Determine if the CCI road map will create any skill gaps, and make a plan to close them. Survey end user adoption and familiarity with existing CCI capabilities. Determine if the I&O organization structure needs to change (e.g., closer alignment between data networking and telecom to support VoIP). Design a coordinated network management plan for real-time media streams across CCI platforms. Build out CCI personas that align with CCI capabilities (e.g., office worker, road warrior, remote worker). Identify strategic workflows and work roles that will drive business-specific CCI ROI. Use a three- to five-year timeline with input and confirmation from all CCI civil war stakeholders. Document all critical integration points (e.g., XMPP gateways, SIP trunking). Identify the potential to reduce number of SIP session managers. Identify and engage in POCs with user communities that have business impact or ROI visibility in the rest of the enterprise or an existing interest in adopting CCI. Establish baseline use case metrics for POC and measure the impact. Promote the success of the collaboration champions via internal marketing Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution prohibited.

11 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 10 Recommendations Bring The It Team Together With A Common Road Map And Vision For Cci The CCI road map needs to incorporate the realities of existing investments, both in technology and embedded user experience. One of the hardest problems to solve is overcoming users muscle memory of existing CCI tools that are less productive. But this fractured CCI dilemma is an opportunity for I&O to step up and bring the entire IT organization together with a common vision. To do so, you should: Develop a more consolidated vendor road map for CCI. This means going from a bestof-breed architecture to a more simplified one, acknowledging the reality of writing down existing assets. This road map should contain a plan for all real-time CCI elements of voice, video, IM, conferencing, and collaboration and social networking. 3 There is an opportunity to ultimately reduce the number of SIP session managers, which will reduce management costs and improve the user experience. For most enterprises today, this should realistically have a five-year horizon. Small and midsize businesses could conceivably move to UC-asa-service (UCaaS) solutions today, but for large enterprises, that move would be the next phase past the five-year planning horizon. Build tailored use cases for the business. Assess which key business units are willing to engage and develop use cases that have demonstrable ROI for CCI deployment. These use cases should identify key workflows that today are inhibited by a lack of good realtime, unified communications tools. The likelihood of discovering and cultivating these relationships increases if the skill camps within the IT organization are on the same page. Promote your early wins. Once the I&O organization team members have engaged these user communities with successful proof-of-concept projects, build them up and promote them as collaboration champions. In some cases, CCI can go viral, where these successful teams then spread their knowledge to other groups, but a formal internal marketing campaign can help further the awareness and interest in CCI capabilities. Supplemental Material Companies Interviewed For This Report Alcatel-Lucent Avaya Dimension Data Verizon Cisco Systems

12 Get Organized To Stop The Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Civil War 11 Endnotes 1 VoIP savings are part of the overall strategy to use both soft and hard-dollar savings to justify CCI investments. Both soft and hard-dollar elements are discussed in the following report. See the July 25, 2012, Build A Better Business Case For UC report. 2 An increasing number of companies are investigating cloud contact centers. In some cases, they may realize cost benefits and increases in flexibility. For example, a number of contact center outsourcers serve customers whose traffic is very seasonal. An on-premises approach to contact center technology would result in idle capacity during the lower-traffic periods. Cloud contact center services allow more flexibility to align their infrastructure expenses with the seasonal traffic. SaaS contact center providers have also long been capable of supporting real-time reliable voice on-premises. See the September 15, 2014, Build An Outside-In Contact Center Road Map report. 3 When developing a unified communications CCI strategy implementation road map, IT infrastructure and operations managers should evaluate their short-term objectives and long-term plans. Steps include identifying end user requirements and estimating budgets and timelines to produce a realistic strategy that supports the goals of your business. See the January 18, 2013, Avoid Tactical, Narrow Communications And Collaboration Infrastructure Strategies report and see the May 29, 2013, Reduce Risk And Drive Adoption With A CCI Road Map report.

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