Will UC be Subsumed by Social – A Follow Up
Will UC be Subsumed by Social – A Follow Up by Blair Pleasant
If you haven’t been following the dialogue between myself and fellow analyst/blogger, Melanie Turek, on nojitter.com, here’s a quick recap.
My article, “Will UC be Subsumed by Social? Heck No!,” discussed how various vendors are moving their brand messages away from a focus on unified communication and instead have moved to collaboration and/or social business themes. While companies like Cisco and IBM move to collaboration and social business, respectively, it might seem as though the Unified Communications market is at risk. That, however, is far from the case. At the core of the collaboration and social business offerings is UC, which remains the communication engine regardless of vendor or product.
In order to gain true value from any of the tools, whether they're unified communications, collaboration, or social business, proper integration into a single user experience for each unique use case is key. Silos just won’t work in today’s business environment. When users have an integrated UC/collaboration/social solution, they can access the tools they need from whatever application they're using, without having to switch between them, enabling them to optimize their business processes.
The combination of UC, collaboration, and social has yet to be given a name, although I've been using the term "Collaborative Communications." With or without a standard term, the effect is clear. We’re slowly (very slowly) starting to see the integration of elements from:
- UC tools like IM, video, presence, and unified client,
- Collaboration technologies like meetings, conferencing, and content sharing, and
- Social tools like communities, activity feeds, and microblogging, and
- Business software applications, as appropriate to the job or role.
Slowly but steadily, we're starting to see collaboration or social business solutions powered by UC on the rise. UC isn't becoming irrelevant – it's actually becoming an essential piece of the solutions, as it provides the communications capabilities that are required for a rich and comprehensive user experience. Unified communications is what provides the presence and IM capabilities, the real time voice capabilities, the multipoint communications, the ability to launch conferences over the web with audio or video, and all from within a business process or application.
In a rebuttal piece, “Sure, Social Will Replace UC--But in Name Only,” Melanie comments that the market is moving way faster than its customer base, and for most companies, UC is nowhere near a reality yet. She notes that my premise that if you now layer on "'social you will enhance the use of the new social and collaboration capabilities that organizations have begun using' assumes that most companies already have the full-blown UC capabilities we've all been crowing about, but they don't.” Melanie adds, “When I look at Blair’s breakdown of the ideal scenario—‘UC tools such as email, voice, text, video, presence, IM, click-to-communicate, mobility, and unified client; collaboration technologies such as shared workspaces, meetings and conferencing; as well as social tools such as communities, user profiles, microblogging, and activity feeds...all coming together’--I get a little dizzy. So do a lot of the IT people I speak with.”
I certainly agree that UC hasn’t taken off as some had hoped and most companies haven’t deployed full-blown UC capabilities. However, the majority of companies have some portions of UC deployed, especially IM/Presence/Click to communicate.
Readers of UCStrategies know that we advocate the deployment of the capabilities that make sense for each company’s business goals and objectives based on the various use cases in their organizations. Very few, if any, companies will deploy or need to deploy all of the UC capabilities provided by their vendors. Instead, capabilities will be deployed and used by different types of users based on their roles, media or channel of choice, and their communication needs – whether they are mobile workers, part of workgroups, or deskbound workers, for example. I agree with Melanie that, “The point is to be able to pick and choose according to time and place, and within a particular business process.” But I disagree with her comment that “human beings are creatures of habit, and essentially lazy; we will gravitate to what we’re used to and what we like, and leave the rest untouched, even if those other options could serve us better. And we don't like it when people change the look and feel of what we like or do.”
Does the fact that we’re creatures of habit mean that organizations shouldn’t deploy tools and technologies such as collaboration and social software that will help workers be more productive and effective? Of course not. The key is to introduce these tools gradually, starting with the people in the organization that are most likely to benefit from them and embrace these tools, and who will then become evangelists for the new technologies.
Melanie rightly points out that many companies are still pretty far from deploying a lot of the communications in the first place, and social media is just one more tech tool (or set of tools) they need to add to the mix. She then asks, “At what point does IT just say ‘Uncle’?”
Hopefully IT won’t need to say “Uncle” if they have the right solutions that are open and flexible, including the appropriate standards and open APIs that allow for pain-free federation and integration of UC with other tools such as social software and collaboration.
Almost all of the customers that I speak with about integrating UC, social, and collaboration tell me that the challenge is not the technology, but the corporate culture and getting people to change the way in which they work. This is one reason most industry observers believe that the entry of the millenials to the workforce will bring a new era of collaboration and sharing, as they are already comfortable with these types of tools and services, especially social software. This next generation of workers is already comfortable with tagging, rating, bookmarking, etc. Actually, it is possibly as much of a cultural challenge for them not to use social and collaborative tools as it is to get more traditional workers to use these tools.
This isn’t to say that integrating all of these technologies is non trivial, but it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge if working with vendors and products that are open, with open APIs and plugins.
Yes, these things take time, and market adoption usually takes longer than vendors hope and than analysts expect. However, there are solid use cases out there demonstrating the value that companies receive by integrating UC, collaboration, and social tools. You’ll hear from some of these customers at my session at Enterprise Connect session, Case Studies: Creating the Social Enterprise (Monday, March 26 2:00 PM–3:00 PM). Hope to see you there and continue the discussion.