Unified Communications Provide Benefits Across the Workplace

In the past, achieving full-scale unified communications (UC) across every department was an extremely difficult task. For companies with branches spread across the country or globe, it’s been a near impossibility.

But new technological innovations such as paperless systems have made UC a realistic goal. According to Carlos Molina, CFO and senior vice president of finance and administration, that was the case for nonprofit health and human services firm United Way of Miami-Dade, after the organization deployed a paperless document management solution seven years ago.

“We realized it wasn’t just that; it was the ease with which we could communicate with each other,” Molina said. “You scan the documents somewhere else and you process the actual data in a centralized office.”

Adoption rates rising?

Awareness of the benefits of unified communications appears to be on the rise, according to research from ITWeb. The survey revealed:

• Nearly 60 percent of respondents said their companies are underway with their unified communications plans, including 32 percent who labeled their adoption rate “extensive.”
• Almost 70 percent of respondents know of the business-related advantages of effective UC strategies.
• Nearly half of respondents feel that hosted UC services would be more cost-effective.

That was certainly true for Advocate Charitable Foundation. Mitchell Gibbs, vice president of advancement services, said the cost of implementing a paperless system was extremely reasonable.

Paving the way for BYOD

Another challenge organizations will have to overcome going forward is accommodating bring-your-own-device (BYOD) practices.

The ITWeb survey revealed that approximately 60 percent of companies allow employees to work remotely. Nearly a quarter of respondents said more than half of their workforce is based outside the office.

Unified communication systems will make BYOD significantly easier to achieve. It will enable companies to benefit from boosts in productivity, cost-efficiency, and worker morale advantages, which many studies have indicated BYOD can lead to.

For Gibbs and Advocate Charitable Foundation, the organization “found that our staff ended up really liking it and were able to integrate it into our workflows, rather than having to adapt to the way PaperSave worked. … It’s dramatically improved our communication within our teams.”

That sentiment was backed up by a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study, according to Business 2 Community. The report revealed that top-notch communication between CIOs and other executives makes a company four times more likely to outperform its competitors.