The past few weeks I have been traveling around the country (with stops in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco and Washington, DC) speaking to audiences about the wonderful world of open and unified communications at the invitation of Siemens Communications as part of its VoiceCon speaking tour and related activities.
Although my presentations have been specifically focused on how SaaS (software as a service) / on-demand / hosted deployment options have fundamentally shifted not only the economics, but the flexibility and agility organizations can enjoy through its adoption, it has amazed me just how much post presentation discussion has been generated around the traditional on-premise model instead in each city.
It’s not that everyone isn’t nodding and agreeing that SaaS delivers some tremendous benefits (like built in fault-tolerance, site independent failover and/or disaster recovery, economics making the most advanced feature sets affordable for the SMB market, etc.) but it’s more that most of the audience (given the sponsors) hails from a large enterprise environment, each with the same critical issue, that of an ROI supporting adoption. It’s not that attendees don’t validate as well the tangible and intangible benefits of Unified Communications (UC). It’s that no one, apparently, has yet to come up with a new, more relevant method of calculating ROI within this space.
These discussions have brought me back to ‘MBA 101′ (or in my case from Georgia Tech in the days of my graduate program an MSM or Master of Science in Management indicative of a supposed more quantitative approach than an MBA alone) from my days in school. Sure it’s the next great wave in communication, but if we continue to try to apply the same old, tired models to it and ultimately can’t quantify the benefits in a manner equally as new and compelling as the technology itself, how can we measure the return and therefore sell the value internally or externally to gain the support for rapid adoption and therefore competitive advantage?
This problem has sparked a renewed interest in me to seek out answers from those far more intelligent than myself to go beyond those simple statements surrounding hard dollar savings on travel, conference calling and the like (which quite frankly have been used for over 20 years or more and applied to every seeming business communications technology along the way) as well as soft dollar savings (easier to reach your party in real time, collaborate on projects regardless of geographic distribution, gain information as it becomes known, etc.). ROI fits nearly into a Capex based argument and can even be applied within an Opex argument as well, but until Hosting providers and UC vendors have the ROI spelled out so a company doesn’t need a room of Ph.D’s to calculate it’s probable application to any specific company’s business operations I think we in the industry all have a problem that will make adoption somewhat less robust than it could, and I believe rightly should, be.
Warren Zevon had a neat little tune he sung in the 80′s, ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’, imlying many things across several cultural, political and business subtexts, but the point I take from it as I apply it to this problem is that within the context of hosted communications and UC, throwing influence, power and financial might at this problem will simply not be enough to drive it to proper solution. The industry, its vendors and all of the analysts responsible for covering it need to ourselves innovate – developing something beyond the standard mechanisms supporting an ROI, perhaps not only supporting the ROI argument, but innovating beyond simple ROI itself. I don’t have the solution yet, nor have I (I am certain) completely framed the issue at hand – so there’s plenty of room for comment and contribution. What are you seeing out there?
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