I’m at the Nortel User Conference, a large international event in Dallas that stretches over 5 days.
The opening keynote was by Joel Hackney, the President of Nortel’s Enterprise division. He commented that it’s not really about Unified Communications, but about “Unified Business”. In his mind, that’s where the value prop lies.
Later in the day, the notion of Unified Business was really brought home when I spent time with Dr Marc Demers, a surgical oncologist at Orlando Regional Health.
He told me how the patient discharge application developed by Nortel, has advanced patient discharge by an average of 4 hours. He commented that a new bed costs in the order of $1M, so that using beds more efficiently means big savings, and of course better patient service.
Dr Demers stressed that, for him, it’s all about simplification.
This got me thinking about the three Unified Cs of Unified Business:
1. Unified Communications-enabled Applications to accelerate the business process from order entry to discharge.
2. Unified Clients to make life simple for clinicians.
3. Unified Collaboration to enable synchronization of activities to make the discharge happen and get the bed ready for the next patient.
What a great story of alignment between IT and the business.
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