Many organizations view communications technology strictly as a cost centre.
We believe that this is a serious mistake, particularly with the current economic climate!
Information Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure should be seen as a strategic asset that can be leveraged to improve organizational effectiveness. This can be described as a dual thrust plan.
First, is the review or audit of existing services and costs, but more importantly is the deployment of resources and solutions that will improve business effectiveness.
Step One – Asset and Operating Cost Review
As is the case with any asset, it is critical to start with an inventory of services, equipment and associated overhead and operating costs.
Part of the process is the audit of the various voice, data and cellular services to ensure that there is a complete inventory with the associated costs. This is in many cases a feat in itself for most companies!
Step Two – Housecleaning of billing errors, rate plan adjustments and technology areas to be consolidated
These costs are reviewed to identify and eliminate overbillings; redundant or unnecessary services to be removed and identify ad move to the best possible bundles and plans to ensure they are in place are in place.
Too often the audit is considered to be by many to be the end game, but this is the starting point for leveraging these strategic assets.
Step Three – Identify opportunities to integrate Voice, Wireless, Data, IP and Applications Software
The high level view of Information Communications Technology (ICT) is to recognize that these components are no longer silos, and should be seen as integrated services that should support the key business processes.
Step Four – ICT Redesigned to Support Restructuring and Downsizing
There are two significant considerations at this point in the process.
One – As part of an organizational restructuring process, technology tools such as telework and remote call centre agents can be deployed that will enable improved organizational performance, and reduced brick and mortar costs.
The technology deployments should have a short term ROI, but also permit to the organization to expand and grow as the economic climate improves.
Two – In order to ensure the human factors are considered, supervisors, managers and staff will need to develop the various multi-medium skills required to work remotely as part of virtual, distribute teams.
Real life examples
1. One example is the ability to deploy fully integrated remote offices. This is more than just telecommuting but now allows road warriors to have fully integrated communications systems on a laptop with wireless devices that are can be set up to be PBX extensions.
2. The second example, as described in our Telecom Journal Issue 3, refers to the situation where many organizations have hidden contact centres. They are often described as help desks, inside sales groups, or client support groups. The implementation of contact centre metrics can improve the efficiencies of these groups by (typically) 18 per cent – 20 per cent. This provides the immediate cost reduction but the real payoff may lie in the availability of multimedia services of voice, web and fax as well as the ability to integrate these business processes with the enterprise wide software applications.
These two examples help define the difference between efficiency gains, (i.e. cost containment) and business effectiveness by re-engineering the business processes that can be supported by technology.
What about the capital costs?
Not all organizations have the same tolerance or ability for capital investments. Unless your organization already has a capital investment planned, there may be value in deploying these capabilities as a managed service that can integrate with existing hardware.
Food for thought re: capital investments alternatives – we have noticed that many of the leading technology suppliers, i.e. HP, Cisco, Avaya, etc. have been offering technology financing incentives that from our analysis are definitely worth consider.
For those companies that don’t want to do capital investments, there are now many managed contact centre services with soft phones on laptops or low cost desktop computers. These types of solutions can significantly reduce one-time costs, and allow services to become operating expense which can be managed as part of the overall cost structures as described earlier in this editorial.
Rethinking your approach to re-engineering your business
Risk assessment is a critical part of business re-engineering.
As part of this overall review, business continuity/ disaster recovery plans and risk analysis associated with aging equipment can be integrated with Information Communication Technology deployment decisions.
By taking an integrative approach of people, process and technology, improved business effectiveness should be considered as part of the ROI of technology decisions. Quite simply, what appears to be cheaper is not always more cost effective, particularly in these challenging times.
In Summary
We have examples of recent client projects where we have taken the approach referenced in this editorial, and have been able to fund the new technology deployments from operational savings and by combining various technology infrastructures together.
,b>As always, I welcome your thoughts, feedback and comments. You can contact me at [email protected] or 905-473-3369 x 1001.
