One of the first things that organizations need to do before moving on technologies such as unified communications, is ensuring that a cohesive and integrated strategy is in place. Collaboration Loop – Reorganizing for Collaboration highlights the need to ensure that cross-department teams are formed to obtain the full benefits of these new technologies. Silos between departments must be broken and communicating is key. From the article:
In a recent conversation with one enterprise, I was surprised to hear that while the voice and data teams worked on plans for migration to VoIP and unified messaging, they had not consulted with the IM group — which had its own plans to deploy an enterprise IM application which offered integrated voice and video. This failure to communicate could have led to redundant, non-integrated systems, resulting in higher costs and a management nightmare. (Think of the scenario when the help desk gets a call that the voice chat capabilities in Microsoft Live Communication Server 2005 aren’t working, only to call the voice group and be told that the voice managers have no idea what the user is talking about.)