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The second most common error, in my list, when deploying voice over IP (VoIP) is ignoring business process improvement.   My original supposition was that customers were foregoing the integration conversation because of the huge capital expenditure on the new phone system, I was wrong.  I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to my readers and my clients; you were not ignoring this opportunity to improve your business communications.  You were not choosing not to spend the time and money to increase departmental productivity and boost overall profitability.  Nope, I have realized in the recently that your integrators and vendors simply have not been capable of explaining to you the process concerning “how” your new VoIP system can improve your business processes.  I realized this when bringing up the concept of business process improvement to those vendors and integrators and getting a blank look from them.  The most repeated comment I hear is, “who are we to tell a customer that we understand their business, let alone that we can improve their process, we aren’t a business consulting firm, you know….”  No, you are not, is my only reply.  To my clients and readers I apologize for the industry’s lack of comprehension, and hopefully some of them will read this article. 

Collaboration is the new buzz word.  What collaboration should mean to you is pretty straight forward and I am saddened by the lack of awareness in my own industry of its definition.  Collaboration is the integration of enhanced communications into your daily business practices.  If that is the definition then to understand the definition we need to only clarify two concepts and then everyone should be able to implement collaboration.  First, what do I mean by enhanced communications?  Second, what are your daily business practices?  Let’s look at each of these questions. 

How do you communicate today?  Here is the list of normal communications within and between companies.  Email (no surprise it’s first in the list), phone, corporate voicemail, mobile phone, mobile voicemail, IM (AOL, MSN and possibly Corporate IM), Conference room video, person to person video, facebook and myspace.  When we work in work groups we may share data files, such as presentations, spreadsheets and the like on a shared drive or maybe even a web based workgroup portal like Microsoft Sharepoint.  But let’s face facts the way you really communicate that data is in an email.  So does this sound familiar?   

What is enhanced communications?  Enhanced communications is the ability to evaluate the preceding paragraph and actually tie them together seamlessly.  Your business has already invested in a voice over IP system, which means they have upgraded the network and designed it to carry voice without degradation, right?  Guess what, that means you can most likely do video as well.  Most of the competent VoIP systems have plug-ins to your email client so that you can select a user and choose click-to-dial while preparing an email.  Corporate instant messaging clients like Cisco’s WebEx Connect, Microsoft’s Office Communicator and Lotus Sametime all support sharing presence information, and controlling either a softphone (computer based IP Phone) or your actual deskphone to make calls from your VoIP system.  Most of those “presence” control panels will allow you to check someone’s presence, send them an instant message, convert that to a phone call, upgrade it to a conference call or engage multiple participants in a WebEx style conference that will allow you to converge audio at the same time as you share your desktop, share files, and engage in better communications.  How about the simple act of getting your voicemail’s delivered to your inbox so that you can listen to it on your Black Berry, or having a single number to call and have it dial both your office phone and your cell phone simultaneously.   These are not really enhanced communications, many of the VoIP systems on the market provide these as standard features.  So let’s dive deeper.  Let’s throw contact centers into the mix.  For those that are unfamiliar with this term think about what you hear when you call most banks today.  The system answers with a list of options and most of them sound life like enough to not irritate everyone.  What if you had those options in your day to day operations, would it help?  Or how about being able to dial a phone number and the system automagically calls each of your team members in an emergency situation?  What about we combine those two and have the system call your employees to check on a process, and the employee is asked to confirm a status by pressing 1 or 2 and based on the response the system calls the next person in the list until you have a resolution at which time the system generates a report and emails it to you.  You should be starting to see what you purchased when you invested in that VoIP infrastructure and system.  It really is a lot more than just some really cool phone.  If you look at the next question critically, then that phone system can turn into a profit center, a cost reducer and method for business process improvement. 

On to the second question, what are your daily business practices?  I ran into problems here.  I started my first business my freshman year of college, and it failed.  I started my second business with a friend of mine 2 years later and it had a successful 8 year run, with over 20 employees.  The differentiator was that I had learned team organization and process.  By applying good old fashioned common sense and with no formal training in management I found, what I now know to be, the most public secret I’ve ever seen.  Plainly stated as, advise your people what you want, ask them if they can think of a better method, and try it.  If your results are not optimal, get additional feed back, make modifications and try it again.  Finally, document it. That’s the short version of most of my success.  For 15 years I’ve been operating under the assumption that “it is so simple everyone must be doing it that way”.  But they don’t.  Large companies pay consultants outrageous fees to analyze existing processes for improvement instead of asking the people doing the job “how” they believe it should be enhanced.  Of late I’ve realized most corporations don’t invest in processes management, unless they are in the manufacturing sector.   I know there are ITIL initiatives, Six Sigma, and process management programs that hinder productivity and I am not promoting those programs for anyone that doesn’t envision a business case them, but for goodness sakes spend a little time with a piece of paper and write down how your business should function.  Then take a hard look at how it “does” function and I’ll bet you’ll be, at least, a little surprised.   I don’t know what your business processes are, but you should.  I can tell you they are categorized as either management, operational or supporting processes and that the internet abounds with business process information.  I can not improve your business process with collaboration.  I can help you improve your business process with communication.  As a consultant I have developed workshops to help you conduct a self analysis.  Start by defining your stakeholders in any given process.  In my case, as an integrator, it is the vendor, the account managers, the inside sales group, the project management group, the engineering team, the logistics team and the customer.  My goal is to improve the existing process as it is currently implemented by adding enhanced communications.  My intent is not to change the existing process, that is an entirely different model of consulting, and I am not an expert in your industry and I will not insult my customers by pretending to be.  Let’s review how we can improve my process and maybe that will present you with some ideas. 

Cisco is one of my chief sales partners and they bring leads to our account team.  Many of those leads, a Cisco account manager and system engineer have already been engaged in and have historical data that they could share with us as an integrator.  Cisco has a Corporate IM client and workspace tool call WebEx Connect.  WebEx Connect combines VoIP call control, audio and web conferencing, desktop sharing, instant messaging, presence sharing and project specific workspace portals that can be used to mash up data from multiple web-based or database applications, store data files and maintain discussion groups within the portal.  The benefit WebEx Connect has over free products like Google, MSN or Yahoo, is that the data is stored on the privately secured WebEx MediaTone network.  This allows my company to use the service with assurance that sensitive customer data can be maintained securely.  Cisco has inserted WebEx Connect workspaces into their process for sharing data internally, by doing so they have allowed me the use of an exciting tool for collaboration.  My company uses WebEx Connect for internal collaboration as well and because of this Cisco can invite me into the existing space that they have established for the customer lead that they would like us to run with.  That workspace could already include the customer and Cisco or just Cisco, but I know have the opportunity to work the deal with all of the information that Cisco has already collected.  My account management team and presales engineer can upload their design work, notes, and discussion points to this workspace during the presales process, so that all parties can see the data, raise discussion points and make corrections.  We have eliminated, in this process, the thousands of emails with huge attachments and the time searching through email strings to make sure that the design is correct and that nothing was missed.  We have collaborated.  When the deal is sold, I can then invite my project manager and my engineering team to this same workspace so they can see the history, review the SOW, understand the politics of the client, and upload the project notes, system design and testing documents.  The inside sales team can be invited so that they are working from the final design and can upload the actual order information for tracking.  The logistics team can review the order and the update shipping and delivery information.  The customer can be invited to ask questions of the entire team for clarification, keep track of discussion points and to make sure that all parties have the same information during the project execution.  The tool will allow you to see the workspace specific presence list of anyone who has been invited into the workspace without adding them to your buddy list.  Presence information will allow you to know if you should IM them, send them an email, Call them pc to pc, video call them pc to pc, or click to call via your VoIP solution.  Of all the tools we explored earlier in the enhanced communication toolbox I have only introduced one into this existing process.  This one tool has saved physical disk space on multiple mail servers, increased productivity by eliminating the classical email search, and has presented all parties in the process with a common easy to use portal from pre-sales to project delivery.  I can now turn the portal over to my maintenance and monitoring team, so that they will have a historical perspective of the client as well as all of the design and as-built documentation. 

Collaboration is the integration of enhanced communications into your daily business practices.  To further clarify, collaboration is the enhancement of existing processes by using an enhanced communication toolset.  Talk to your stake holders and ask them what applications they are using, CRM, ERP, and / or custom databases.  Then begin to at least have the conversation with your integrator about how they can help you enhance your daily processes with the equipment and infrastructure you have already spent so much money on.  If they are unable to help, feel free to drop me a line. 

Dan Stephens is the Unified Communications Practice Lead for Presidio Networked Solutions in the Mid-Atlantic Region.  He has over 20 years of network, systems, security and voice experience.  He holds many industry certifications including CISSP, CCVP, and the MCSE + database + messaging. He is also a CompTia CTT+ Certified technical trainer and has been certified to conduct Netware, Microsoft and Cisco courses.  He can be reached at dstephens@presidio.com or Stephens.dd@gmail.com