Will video kill UC’s star? Choose carefully before making deployment decisions

Whatever you say about business technology today, you’ve got to admit one thing: It’s pretty impressive stuff. Whether you’re sending an instant message to your boss from an airport gate or collaboratively updating a presentation in real-time with your globally scattered team, today’s tools allow us to do things we couldn’t even imagine a few short years ago. It seems everyone has a favourite tool or capability. The one thing that makes them go “wow” whenever they flip it on. I’ll sheepishly admit my weakness is video. There’s something otherworldly about plugging in a camera you bought for less than dinner at a decent restaurant and then using it to chat away, live and in colour, with a colleague half a world away – or even better, reading the kids a bedtime story when you’re travelling. Few technologies change the nature of communication as fundamentally as video, and it’s for good reason that it’s finally coming into its own as an accepted medium for conducting business. As unified communications (UC) solutions pave over formerly disconnected media and streamline how we connect, video is playing a major role in the transition. Just because you can implement something, however, doesn’t mean you should. For all its potential, video can still be a solution looking for a problem. And despite significant advancements in bandwidth availability and affordability, Quality of Service (QoS), and the continued evolution of easy-to-use, highly integrated video tools, video is not a blanket solution for everyone. Organizations must carefully match any video-related projects to specific business requirements. A one-size-fits-all video deployment strategy could squander organizational resources and negate any tactical benefits that might have otherwise been realized. The following areas can be especially hard hit if video is simply tossed onto the network and made available to everyone: Productivity. Video can add value in certain business scenarios, such as work teams that produce interactive demos. If a picture – or video – is worth a thousand words, they’d be using infinitely too many words if forced to make do with audio-only connectivity. But if video is added to a simple round-table update meeting for no reason beyond trying to find a way, any way, to leverage new technology, participants may find themselves focusing more on their on-camera persona than their work. Workflow. Video changes how we get work done in significant as well as subtle ways. The simple act of taking notes or marking up a Word document, for example, could look very different if video is incorporated into the interactive editing process. This could influence role design – a process that can quickly backfire if business leadership isn’t centrally involved early in the process. Infrastructure. Like Voice over IP (VoIP) before it, video places greater strain on corporate networking resources. While every instance is different, failure to plan up-front for this additional bandwidth requirement could compromise performance elsewhere. QoS for video-based applications is also much more sensitive to fluctuations in network performance than non-multimedia traffic like e-mail. While no one would notice if a particular message took an extra two seconds to be delivered, such lag and latency in a video conversation would be unacceptable. Mobility. As much as we all want to be Dick Tracy, it remains to be seen how much value video-enabled field sales reps add to the bottom line. Sophisticated mobile CRM and sales pipeline management applications already allow sales professionals to do more, and do it more quickly, while they’re away from the office. Thanks to these apps, sales pros spend less time shuffling paper in a cubicle and more time selling directly to clients. While the ROI of mobile apps has long been proven, the ROI of mobile video isn’t as well defined. Until it is, I’d rather spend the money on number-crunching mobile code and leave the video off of the BlackBerry or iPhone. We’ll leave discussions of safety for another day. Like any technology, video has its place. But businesses can hardly know where or what that place is if they don’t take the time to assess their organizational workflows and talk with the people who would use these tools every day. UC can be an enabling driver of more fluid organizational communication, but only if organizations approach it the right way: UC is a buffet of choices, including e-mail, voice, IM and, yes, video, and planners are free to include or exclude any of these to meet any given business requirement. Although a needs assessment has always been a crucial first step of any technology planning process, it is especially critical when considering video-related options because of the potential to so radically alter how people work. From where I sit, video is still an undeniably cool technology that has its place in today’s business. Just make sure that place makes sense for you before you consider distributing it to everyone in the organization.

Will video kill UC’s star? Choose carefully before making deployment decisions

News | 08/30/2009 3:57 pm EDT

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