Hi folks

Continuing on with a series of blogs on UC and managed services, Elizabeth Klingseisen is back with a blog  discussing critical success factors for outsourcing.

Three factors are crucial in making outsourcing a success: smart sourcing, due diligence and strategic risk partnerships.

With pressure still on both the top and bottom line, IT professionals are finding it harder than ever to walk the tightrope of operational efficiency versus building for growth. But despite continuing economic challenges, the world of IT innovation has proved fertile ground over the past few years with growing momentum and maturity around solutions such as cloud computing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) and unified communications.

To easily access these solutions, an increasing number of organizations are looking towards outsourcing and out-tasking. Out-tasking is popular with IT departments, because it is able to make an immediate and tangible impact on cost reduction. Whereas many other technology promises wander into the murky waters of 'productivity gains', out-tasking elements of service provision and technology change (at an agreed, recurring cost) does stand out as a true, measurable beacon for cost reduction and transparency.

But it's not just about cost. Outsourcing and out-tasking also offers significant strategic advantage by helping organizations fund their technology transformation, access the right skills and keep the core of their operation agile. While there are many factors involved making outsourcing a success, experience has shown three factors – smart sourcing, diligence and 'risk collaboration' – can make the difference between success and failure.

1. 1.       Smart-sourcing

Smart-sourcing means looking beyond single IT outsourcing agreements towards out-tasking either 'towers' within your IT enterprise (i.e., communications) or functions within general operations where it makes most sense (i.e., service desks or network monitoring). Out-tasking offers key fundamental advantages over outsourcing; it allows you to test the validity of your business case on a lower risk basis and retain a stronger mix of strategic and operational control in your operation.

1. 2.       Be diligent in your diligence

An understanding of what you have in your network, where it is and exactly how much it costs to support can be difficult to pinpoint with accuracy. It's important to test the claim of a provider that claims to magically achieve a full understanding of what you may have struggled to achieve. What is their process for diligence and auditing? What is the typical cycle? What are the timeframes for different site profiles? What tools do they use? And most importantly – what happens when their findings are not accurate or are vastly different to yours? Who validates and how? The bottom line here is that if you get the audit wrong, you'll run into challenges further down-stream.

1. 3.       Collaborating on risk

This is where the difference between providers really starts to materialize. Within this strategic partnership you are considering, there are some key questions to consider. Who's responsible for system uptime? Do you have an explicit plan for demarcation of responsibility and resolution? But so much more importantly, when things do go wrong, what is the providers answer beyond 'service credits'? What will they do to ensure system recovery and where have they done it before? And lastly, what is your provider prepared to put into contract to underscore their commitment to de-risking your continuity and quality of service?

Elizabeth Klingseisen is director, managed services marketing at Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Are you asking yourself where you should start your unified communications and collaboration (UCC) project? Should it be the voice platform, the desktop or the presence application?

Expertise in converged communications across traditionally siloed telecom and IT management is difficult to rapidly and economically acquire and maintain, particularly if it includes multi-vendor best-of-breed solutions. In addition, UCC integration requires complex and subtle re-engineering of tasks to manage workflows and presence into business processes. This asks for a complex consultative and design skill set that is not typically available in-house.

We believe that because every UCC implementation is unique, a services-led approach including integration services, technical services, consulting, hosted services and managed services can help you choose the right path. Let’s examine in more detail why this approach works.

1. 1.       Building your enterprise UCC vision

UCC is a technology that will transform not only your workplace but also your core business strategies and how you approach, service and manage your customers. It’s critical you establish up front your UCC vision by answering the following questions: what is your business purpose for implementing UCC, what will you achieve and what must you do now? It is important to work cooperatively with a vendor who can provide consultative professional services that will enable you to build and realize that vision, day-by-day, week-by-week and month-by-month.  

1. 2.       Keeping integration simple

When it comes time to integrate business applications, redesign workflows, manage separate directories and establish processes—in addition to the pure integration capabilities—enterprises need to prepare their end users for change so they are able to take advantage of the new functionality. A key advantage to a services approach is tapping into vendors’ technology integration and business process expertise along with their consulting advice.

Layering on top a “day two” managed service solution offers a simple, easy to implement deployment, guaranteeing a more competent execution and functional day-to-day operations. Vendors who offer strong consulting and professional services capabilities in conjunction with their managed services are in the best position to help their customers adjust their processes to work efficiently with their managed UC services.

1. 3.       Bridging the IT transition 

Unified communications can be a powerful tool when integrated with business processes such as CRM and ERP. However, this level of integration requires specific expertise and significant contributions from both IT and communications staff—which is where many companies encounter roadblocks.

Traditionally, organizations manage their voice and data networks separately and have limited cross-functional experience. This puts a strain on resources and significantly reduces efficiencies when transitioning into a UCC environment. IT staff may become overwhelmed with the increased IT activity along with juggling the demands of replacing or upgrading infrastructure components. A vendor with professional and managed service capabilities can stem the risks and save costs by managing the complete implementation and operations process. 

1. 4.       Managing multi-vendor solutions

There are numerous rewards in adopting a best-of-breed UC architecture. As a consequence, UCC implementations will nearly always require integration between two or more vendors’ UCC component point products. Multi-vendor capability—particularly the ability to ‘bridge’ multiple technology platforms—demands a provider who is adept at understanding voice, data, applications and security issues.

What about in-house UC deployments? After all, who knows your applications and business processes better? While it seems like a sensible approach, in reality in-house deployments almost always lead to an overworked IT department and projects that run over-time and budget. 

In contrast, a managed services deployment can provide a comprehensive UC architecture specifically designed to gain a more cost-effective and predictable solution. Take the guesswork, strain and stress out of managing a UC integration in-house by working with a managed services provider who can supply a fully trained and certified staff to handle complex, multi-vendor UC integrations from execution to follow-up and support.

1. 5.       Operating at full capacity on “day two”

Managed services are a vital link to help organizations achieve a lower cost of ownership and predictable monthly costs, but they can also help eliminate transition issues by leveraging their operational expertise and accessing the skilled resources required for harnessing the demands of an evolving communications world.  

When looking to maximize your company’s investment in IT and communications infrastructure, a managed services approach is an excellent opportunity to advance capabilities and future-proof existing investments. The UCC entry-point becomes a non-issue once you gain a partner that can reduce inefficiencies; integrate diverse, multi-vendor systems; and migrate technology upgrades across dispersed users. 

Elizabeth Klingseisen is director, managed services marketing for Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Don’t let rapidly evolving technologies and multi-vendor IT and communications environments create havoc and confusion in your organization. As enterprises assess how to build, deploy, and manage their unified communications and collaboration (UCC) strategy, they are increasingly turning to managed services to ensure success. A 2009 Frost & Sullivan survey of C-level executives found that more than 50 percent of respondents intended to increase their usage of managed services over the following year.

Using a managed services partner to outsource non-core functions can significantly reduce the complexity of your UCC deployment. But to make the relationship a success, there are five key steps that you should follow when building your UCC sourcing strategy.

Step 1: Evaluate your current IT environment

Enterprise IT is becoming increasingly more complex and diverse as a result of mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, multi-vendor technology integrations and a growing number of remote workers. Many organizations don't have an accurate assessment of their current IT infrastructure environment and therefore need to take stock as a first step in the planning process.

In the evaluation phase, you will need to take a complete inventory of your infrastructure assets and network, staff skills and capabilities, and total cost of ownership. This needs to be combined with a detailed understanding of how your IT strategy aligns with current business direction. You may even consider engaging external consultants to assist with this evaluation.

Step 2: Set clear objectives

Determine the exact areas in your company that you’ll find to be most beneficial to outsource and align clear and measurable expectations. Objectives should incorporate answers to your costs and quality of service (QoS) requirements:

• ·         Cost transparency: what do you want to pay for and where do you expect to save money
• ·         Define your service-level expectations
• ·         What business continuity, security risks and security constraints should be accounted for?
• ·         What business processes would you need to integrate with network monitoring tools to resolve issues and network failures?
• ·         What are your reporting, review and escalation needs?

Step 3: Create a detailed migration plan

Implementing a UCC environment requires successful deployment, integration and coordination of key functional elements. You will need a well-constructed migration plan that will provide clear direction and roles for your own organization and managed services partner, including:

• What skills will you need?
• What are the key milestones?
• What is your preferred migration or cut-over path (geographical, functional, line of business)?
• What are your escalation points?

The outline of these criteria will serve as a formative guide when evaluating and selecting a managed services provider. The more you can uncover deficiencies in your IT and communications systems, the more you can leverage a partner’s strengths.

Step 4: Select a managed services provider

There are several factors to consider when evaluating vendors. Providers need to be able to handle extensive IP data networking and real-time communications with products from a variety of vendors. Experienced partners also need to offer a comprehensive product and services portfolio including advanced, scalable solutions your company can grow into.

Review a provider’s implementation history and track record to understand their key strengths and abilities. Large enterprises should search for providers with broad geographic coverage to manage consolidation across dispersed locations. Finally, the financial viability of a provider is important in guaranteeing the long-term objectives and requirements as your company evolves over time.

Making the right decision takes pre-planning and diligence, but the end result can be a forward-thinking, productive relationship essential for business-process success.

Step 5: Maintain an effective partner relationship

Once you’ve chosen your provider, create a working group or task force to define the key collaborative processes that can be impacted by a UCC initiative. Take advantage of your vendor’s knowledge transfer and look at similar projects implemented for other customers to help reduce lengthy project duration. Tap into your providers’ technical and customer service staff capabilities and keep the communication and feedback open to increase productivity and success.

The last and most important aspect in managing your vendor is to maintain predictable costs and quality of service. Your service-level agreement should be reviewed continuously to make sure you are receiving the quality of work your company has paid for.

Martin Schubert is senior vice president of services for Siemens Enterprise Communications and is responsible for managed services globally. You can contact him at martin.a.schubert@siemens-enterprise.com.

Focus on both your short and long-term desired results and set clear business objectives. Find an MSP who can be your single point of contact for service delivery, UC technology provisioning, and strategic planning and execution. This will help you balance short-term requirements and maintain focus on continuous business innovation. The MSP should help you identify both immediate cost savings opportunities and link UC to your business requirements and goals.

Tip 2: Cultural compatibility is key

Make sure your service provider understands more than just how to design, deploy and maintain UC. An MSP needs to be compatible with your company's culture, business objectives and working style. More importantly, they need to be a partner and an advisor to you in making recommendations for your ongoing evolution of UC.

Tip 3: Use standard methodologies

Find an MSP with proven, repeatable processes and standard methodologies. They should be able to take on mixed vendor, mixed technology environments and deliver services under a single SLA. They also should map delivery standards to ITIL and be able to migrate your existing technology to an open communications architecture. By using a service provider with a standards-based, consistent delivery methodology you will receive more effective and consistent services.

 Tip 4: Look under the hood

Inquire about the MSP’s infrastructure and staff capabilities. Multi-vendor capabilities are a critical component of service delivery excellence for UC. Look for an MSP that has a state-of-the-art support infrastructure, toolsets and people. The infrastructure should include globally linked secure network operating centers, technical assistance centers and service help desks. Staff will need to have the experience and certifications to handle complex, multi-vendor UC environments. Best practices to look for should include testing and staging labs co-located with the service help desks for hands-on replication of errors and technology that allows you a view into open ticket status and reporting.

Tip 5: Insist on flexibility and options

MSPs should offer flexible deployment and contracts with maximum control and accountability of delivery service levels. A rip and replace of your current voice infrastructure investments is not necessary and the MSP should be able to protect your assets while introducing the benefits of UC over a timeframe that meets your needs. Insist on this as part of your solution. Your contract should also allow you to modify service delivery models and integrate new requirements to your business needs. A flexible delivery partner can offer you a predictable and transparent service, achieved through provisioning on a price per user basis—a flat price, per user, per month for service delivery and new technology.

Tip 6: Build business case

Formulate a business case for return on investment (ROI) that is comprehensive and achievable. Managed services can reduce direct costs of operation by up to 35 percent for many enterprises. The MSP should offer a range of services that can both help you understand the cost of service delivery in your current design, and also identify the technology solutions that could bring down your communication related operating costs. Savings can be found by eliminating costly off-network charges such as toll charges or external conference service expenses. Another cost savings example is reducing the time costs of managing multiple suppliers by collapsing the vendor maintenance contracts into one simplified, manageable agreement.

 Tip 7: Ensure service is scalable

"Cooperate Or Lose." That was the title of a recent issue of brand eins, a German business magazine. Expanding on that topic, one article describes how companies like the mid-sized producer of heating elements, Friedrich Freek GmbH, increasingly cooperate with competitors in select areas. To answer increasing competition from new markets and adjacent industries, companies increase their investments in innovation resulting in more complex products and services. Thus, many tasks become too big or costly for a single company to deal with on their own. "We have fought against our competitors for decades," said Stefan Kaiser, Freek GmbH's general manager. "Now we cooperate and it pays off for everyone."

Many companies need to navigate new, unfamiliar market environments, and technologies like unified communications (UC) and communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) must help them do this in an efficient way. However, even the technology providers must have closer cooperation to develop solutions with higher business impact for their customers.

Established tools of coordination and communication-namely email and standalone telephony-prove increasingly inefficient when dealing with massive communication volumes within fragmented and complex environments. We all experience that on a daily basis when checking our inboxes. UC makes the coordination of fragmented workflows much easier. As an example, presence status makes it possible to reach partners via phone or instant messaging when they're actually available. Presence status complements the open door or burning light in offices just across the street, as some of those offices can now be located in a different company on the other side of the globe.

Even more sophisticated concepts, like CEBP, make communication an integral part of business software used to develop new products and manage joint value chains. For instance, UC solutions can be integrated into product lifecycle management (PLM) software like Teamcenter or Dassault Systèmes V6, that are widely used in the automotive and other manufacturing industries. Using the converged solution an engineer can look at the rendering of a car engine and click on a particular part of the engine to see the relevant contact people for questions about that part. Colleagues and partners working together in distributed environments should be able to communicate in a seamless process-oriented way with the tools and platforms they're already using to do their jobs. There should no longer be any need to look up and jot down phone numbers or make multiple contact attempts to discuss important milestones with an outside supplier.

Managing competition is not only a challenge for many users but also for UC providers themselves who need to think and act in new terms. For example, the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) joins companies who are both partners and competitors in that space. One of UCIF's goals is to make UC solutions interoperable and enable users to communicate across organizational boundaries, for example through presence federation. Federation makes it possible to see the presence status of inside and outside partners irrespective of the technology they're currently using within their organizations. Closed protocols, interfaces and platforms might have been competitive advantages in the past, but now they often stand in the way of technological and organizational openness. This makes UCIF itself an example of selective cooperation between companies that are competitors in many other arenas. As the industry is realizing, that's the only way to deal with challenges getting too big for single players.

The examples of Friedrich Freek GmbH and UCIF illustrate how traditional concepts of competition, innovation and production are evolving towards more open forms of cooperation. Company and market boundaries continue to dissolve with very real implications for daily work and the way people communicate. Integrated communication solutions like UC and CEBP must be implemented with these market realities in mind. That's when technological openness and process integration enable inside and outside partners to cooperate, and win.

Unified Communications Overview

Unified communications is a term used to describe a broad set of communications and collaboration capabilities that are designed to enhance individual and workgroup level performance. This is accomplished by providing communications tools such as IM, presence, voice, video, email and collaboration functions in a single client interface. While the end user sees only a single interface, all of these communication tools require a number of software elements that today reside on separate physical servers. There is a level of complexity in the backend in the design, deployment and management of these software components. By leveraging some of the key data center technologies vendors are striving to reduce complexity in all areas to foster greater adoption and innovation.

Virtual Appliance Overview

Virtual appliances are pre-built software solutions comprised of one or more virtual machines that are packaged, updated, maintained and managed as a unit. Unlike a traditional hardware appliance, these software appliances let customers easily acquire, deploy and manage pre-integrated solution stacks. This speeds up time to market and simplifies software development, distribution and management. With virtual appliances vendors can create a single platform, reducing the cost and complexity of software development and management. They can efficiently and securely distribute the virtual appliance in an industry standard format such as the open virtualization format (OVF). Customers can deploy an OVF packaged virtual appliance on the virtualization platform of their choice. This approach will significantly reduce the complexity of implementing a unified communications portfolio.

Unified Communications as a Virtual Appliance

Unified communications comprise a number of individual software elements. Each of these software elements represents a critical part of an overall UC solution; however, they also represent increased complexity. Developing, testing and maintaining separate stacks can be time consuming and often confusing to channel partners and customers. The OVF provides a new paradigm to distribute software solutions. Complex multi-tier applications consisting of several virtual hosts can be configured and packaged into a single "virtual appliance." Virtual appliances enable software vendors to greatly reduce the cost of distributing, installing and configuring a solution. Distributing unified communications as a virtual appliance enables vendors to deliver a complex solution consisting of many applications as a single package that is easy to design, deploy and manage.

In summary, virtual appliances can address several pain points for vendors, channel partners and customers when it comes to implementing unified communication platforms. The benefits apply to the full lifecycle from design to deployment to ongoing management.

As a result of this transformation it's more and more common for these software elements to relocate to the data center and become part of the overall enterprise software ecosystem. Traditionally this has presented several challenges to the enterprise since real-time communications applications have some very strict requirements in terms of availability, performance and security. Because of these requirements, it was often necessary to keep the real-time components separate from the rest of the data center. However, this is beginning to change in a substantial way.

The same attributes of virtualization can now be applied to real-time applications thanks to the convergence of communications software becoming more open from a software perspective while virtualization technology has addressed some the deficiencies in its support of real-time software. One area of improvement is with the latest release of Nehalem chip set from Intel. These latest chips now incorporate some of the virtualization functions where previously this was handled by the hypervisor itself.  As a result of these improvements, real-time applications running on a standard operating system such as Linux can now make use of all virtualization has to offer. This can range from server consolidation to hardware agnostic implementations to even more advanced vendor specific capabilities like automating virtual machine moves.

IP telephony and even more importantly unified communications always had the goal of driving integration between communications and line-of-business applications. We have seen progress along the way as the industry has evolved; however, progress has been slower than predicted. With advancements in virtualization coupled with the open software environment of real-time communication another barrier has been breached on the way to fully integrating voice and data communications in the data center.

Essentially, it comes down to what it means to customers and why they should care. IT managers should care because this development will lead to a fundamental shift in deployment for their real-time assets. They won't have to make separate arrangements in the data center for their voice and UC platforms. IT managers can design, deploy and manage their real-time applications in the same manner as their line-of-business applications by virtualizing real-time communications. Depending on the specific vendor, IT managers will also have access to some of the advanced capabilities virtualization can provide such as the ability to move virtual machines in a manual or automated manner.

In summary, the ability to virtualize real-time communications is a significant step in the evolution of voice becoming an application in the data center. The benefits to the enterprise are many and span everything from the design phase through deployment and ongoing management. Beyond the relevant cost savings, the ability to run virtual instances of real-time and line-of-business applications side-by-side in the data center will foster greater innovation and make embedding communications into software much more common going forward. As a final thought, virtualizing real-time software also has many implications for customers thinking about how to leverage cloud computing for their organization. More on that in a future blog.

Needs Assessment: This can encompass modeling current business practices. Looking at how your business communicates both internally and externally. Categorizing end user roles and responsibilities. Finally it determines the applicability of each UC service to your organization. Where should you begin and what should be introduced first to get the best results.

ROI and TCO assessment: Taking the information gathered from a Needs Assessment, this service will allow you to have a better understanding of the financial benefits to implementing your UC solution. It's critical to justify your business case and a useful exercise for any corporation.

UC Architectural Design: This really focuses on how the UC platform will be implemented and tied into the enterprise over a given period of time. It provides a target architecture so the customer can better understand where the end state will be and how they will get there.

Security, Telephony, and Network Assessments: These are all critical elements to a successful implementation. It is also a key risk management function since the main goal is to gain a more intricate understanding of the enterprise infrastructure as it stands today, as well as what modifications need to be made to support the target architecture.

Project Management: This service can't be overstated. A competent and experienced project manager will make or break a UC implementation. Project managers should have the right mix of certification and practical experience.

Multi Vendor Management: In the real world it's not possible to rip and replace an existing platform overnight. Investments need to be protected and a graceful migration will need to be put in place. Having a vendor that can provide this
service can give you confidence and help to manage a transformation in a controlled manner.

NOC services: How do you manage your environment on a day to day basis? Do you have the tools and expertise to manage the new environment accurately? The ability to outtask certain operational management functions can greatly alleviate overhead of managing your own network. This allows you to make better use of your personnel to work on more strategic revenue-producing projects while ensuring the health of your investment over its lifecycle.

Open Service Delivery should encompass all of the above to provide a cradle to grave capability for the customer. It can reduce risk, justify your investment, and safely maintain its operation over time. As part of any UC platform analysis, Open Service Delivery is a key consideration.  This is the last of the 7 core principles of Open Communications. If you follow all seven, I am confident your UC project will be a success and more importantly your company will enjoy the results of that success for years to come. Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.
 

So, what does this mean for Unified Communications?  Well, in order for organizations to fully adopt social networking one day as a viable
meeting place for getting work done, a couple things have to happen.  One, organizations must feel comfortable with cloud computing.  And we all
know the hesitations there: reliability, availability, and security.  Two, cloud based business services would have to be provided by the social networking site so that work can get done. These cloud based business services, or "Virtual Company Services" as I like to call them, could range from access to CRM's like Salesfore.com, web conferencing tools like WebEx or access to an entire virutal computing environment like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  

In essence, the LinkedIn's and Facebook's of the world are well positioned, today, to be the future channel for reselling virtual company services
like Unified Communications.  Packaged and sold to businesses who no longer have a brick and mortar establishment, but rather a bunch of at home
workers who connect online with their co-workers in a virtual company, managed by a social networking site, doing all their work in the cloud.

Matthew Hartley
Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc
matthew.hartley@siemens-enterpirse.com

 In order to achieve the same level of business continuity in this brave new world, it's critical to ensure that you have the right architecture. The attributes of such an architecture are varied but some of the critical ones are listed below.

 Active/Active vs. Active/Standby: In an active/active architecture all registered endpoints are cached on both sides of the cluster. Most enterprise voice platforms today support active/standby in which a re-registration process must take place when one side of the cluster fails. This is completely unsatisfactory in an enterprise production environment today. Active/Active ensures that not only is a re-registration process not necessary but when a side of the cluster fails, the end user knows no difference. They continue to process calls and invoke features. Furthermore, the architecture is built so that only one side of the cluster is necessary to support all subscribers.

 Multiple levels of hardware/software redundancy: Simply put this means no single point of failure in the core call control platform. From a hardware perspective, this is normally handled by replicating all critical hardware interfaces and components in a server (hard drives, processors, NIC cards, and power). The software is much more complex. Linux as an underlying OS is critical. In addition, some clustering functions are required that work in concert with the OS as well as the application to optimize the failover process when it's necessary.
 
 From Embedded to Standalone: Some UC architectures today have completely intertwined the call control with other communication channels that a failure in the core architecture means all communication channels are impacted. The architecture must support the ability to back off to a basic voice capability should the application platform become impacted.
 
 Standalone Survivability: As I mentioned previously there are many moving parts in the enterprise today and so even with the most resilient architecture there is always the possibility for network hardware or the network in general to fail. When this happens a typical customer may not have a backup connection. That means the individual site must be able to standalone and provide basic services to the end user as required. It must do so in a seamless manner and must restore service to the core platform when the network is available again.
Some architectures provide these standalone functions in combination with the routing functions. This can be a significant issue if that platform fails as all services in the branch will be impacted.

 Beyond the attributes mentioned above, I believe it's possible to take the resiliency functions even farther. With the right combination of software, hardware, and networking complimenting each other, resiliency can be extended and multiplied. Take the example of my cable service outage at the beginning of my blog. Extend the principle of using a wireless backup capability to restore service in the enterprise space. With the advent of 3G and soon 4G, it would be possible to provide this alternate network connection on demand. If you take this concept forward you can see an environment where virtual software functions can be moved from data center to data center ensuring call control will always be available.
In my opinion, we are nearing the day when we will raise the bar for resiliency that was originally set by Ma Bell a long, long time ago.

• Unified Communications
• IT Based Communication
• Fixed Mobile Convenience
• Business Process Integration

• Are the APIs extensive enough to provide multiple integration points into a customer application
• Beyond the standard line of business apps, what other integrations can be offered into areas such as management, modeling, and provisioning applications.
• Does the vendor have a well conceived methodology covering needs assessment, design, integration, and on-going monitoring to ensure success
• Does the vendor have experience across the line of business landscape or just within one segment (Microsoft only, IBM only, SAP only)

Of course these are just a few questions that should be asked. Just as important to the overall success of implementing BPI through UC is how well you know and understand your corporate culture. Does your company typically work in silos, do your employees embrace change or are they somewhat resistant. Do you natuarlly collaborate across departments or with other companies/customers/partner? How do you measure employee productivity? In addition, it is important to understand and model employee roles and responsibilities.  Are employee roles well defined today? Finally, how well do you understand your current business processes? Are you able to model these processes to see if they are viable and efficient today? Are you able to analyze where improvements can be made?  If not is your vendor capable of providing this service in order to identify where UC atrributes can be applied to result in improvement.  

if you can answer the questions above than you are well on your way to gaining real value for your enterprise with BPI/CEBP.