Spending on converged voice, video and data networks
could be wasted if businesses fail to audit how information travels
between departments before installation, analyst firm Quocirca has
warned.
Speaking at the IP07 event in London this week, Rob Bamforth,
senior analyst at Quocirca, said that identifying delays in
existing business processes was the first part of successfully
installing converged applications like
unified communications.
Companies should distinguish activities where getting access
through to the right person is more important than getting access
to information, for example, a senior manager who needs to
authorise expense claims, Bamforth said.
"The success of any converged network application should be
measured against the reduced time it takes to repeat a common
business process, for example, the number of times an engineer
needs to call-in or increased responsiveness to customer queries,"
said Banforth.
Clive Longbottom, principal analyst at Quocirca and also
presenting at the event, said that convergence can help save costs
- but that companies need to give different security
classifications to different types of data travelling across the
same network and the allowable means by which they can be sent over
the network.
Some 83% of attendees polled at last year's event said that they
"strongly agreed" that the real challenge posed by IP is
re-engineering the organisation so that they are ready to use
converged applications. About 80% of attendees also found
installing new applications "very challenging."