In today's fast-paced business environment, the need to be able to respond to both internal and external concerns both quickly and effectively is paramount to success. That includes the ability to do so from a variety of locations, including the office desk, the conference room, the train, the home office, and more.
Businesses are quickly learning that they need to invest in technologies that enable a constant flow of information between colleagues, partners, and customers - to become a dynamic enterprise.
Alcatel-Lucent believes that a truly dynamic enterprise is one in which "innovation, performance and productivity are the norm, marked by continuous and transformative growth," and seeks to drive the concept into its global enterprise customers.
One starting point is to help businesses understand what a dynamic enterprise really is, which Alcatel-Lucent seeks to do with a growing library of resources in the Next Generation Communications community, as well as its Dyanamic Enterprise micro-site.
Of course, the other challenge is to get businesses - IT departments and executives, in particular - to understand how dynamic their current technology allows them to be... or not be. In order to assist that - and this is also another means of helping define the dynamic enterprise - Alcatel-Lucent has included a self-test on its site, which asks a series of 21 questions about the user's feelings on his company's technology and its impact on processes, collaboration, mobility, and other components of a dynamic enterprise.
- When I think of my company's information and communication systems I feel like this
- When I think of meetings with the senior management it feels like this
- Once I would like to achieve this
- My business looks like this
- When I think of Alcatel-Lucent it feels like this
- When I think about how we share information in my company it feels like this
- When I need to find information in my company, it feels like this
- This reflects how easy it is to reach people in our company
- When our people are out of the office they feel like this
- This is how a 20-year old will view your communications and IT infrastructure
- How would a 20 year old feel about joining the company (IT structure)?
- When you think about the communication tools the company has given you, you feel like this...
- How would you like your communication tools to be?
- How easy is it to get an answer from your company experts when you need them?
- How easy is it to find knowledge that resides within the company's systems?
- How secure does it feel when you log into your company's network?
- How would you feel if you lost your laptop?
- How do teams and groups collaborate in your organization?
- How do you think contact center agents feel?
- How do you think your customers feel when they call your company?
- How do you imagine a Dynamic Enterprise to be?
Upon completion of the questionnaire - and it only takes a few short minutes to pick the answer to each question from a set of graphical buttons depicting various sentiments from utter satisfaction to horror and everything in between - the site returns an analysis of sorts based on the responses.
The results provide a basic overview of the results as they pertain to overall attitudes towards IT and the communications infrastructure, perceptions of management, the ability to effectively communicate and locate information, as well as several key components of enterprise communications (security, mobility, contact center).
Now, while these analyses do not provide complete insight into how to improve a business' infrastructure and communications technologies, nor any sort of cost analysis, it does provide some basic direction. More importantly, though, it provides an understanding of the concepts and the technologies in which dynamic enterprises are investing. In other words, it's helping spread the word about Alcatel-Lucent's idea of a dynamic enterprise - for which it has an entire set of products and solutions that can be integrated to create a flexible, dynamic, next generation enterprise.
Take the quiz to see where how dynamic your business is! Are you on your way to being a truly connected enterprise, or are you struggling to keep pace with technology, or have you already fallen behind?
