1st Trend – Cloud 2.0 – Vendor Challenges
Enterprise customers are starting to invest in various types of VoIP, UC and storage cloud solutions, but customers and vendors are struggling with:
- Too many technology solution choices and approaches, whether Cloud, customer premises or hybrid alternatives
- It is difficult and time consuming to get accurate designs, deployment, options and support questions and details to decide, let alone support next generation technologies
- Putting it all together is not easy to do at all (based on our early adopter client projects)!
- It is difficult to manage and measure vendor deployment, service levels and even paying invoices for converged/cloud technology solutions.
2nd Trend – Social Media for Business 2.0 – Which one to use?
Issues/concerns for Business Customers:
- Leveraging content effectively across multiple social media apps
- Network impacts (still not clearly known or communicated)
- How to manage all of the various hosted applications integrated together, and be secure
- How and what technologies to deploy, let alone why (with real business ROIs?)
3rd Trend for 2014 – Having the right current skills, knowledge and processes to deploy, manage changing communications solutions
- Current replacement technology solutions are causing challenges across vendors, companies and users to design, deploy and support, disregarding cloud, customer premise, etc.
- Tech industry is continuing to reduce headcount, with most of the baby boomers moving to channel partners.
- Many, if not almost al,l of our Enterprise and government customers have job openings in their IT and contact center service oriented departments
- Young people are continuing to stay away from high tech and engineering oriented programs, which will cause more pressure in the future for resources on all sides
- Users across all generations are struggling to maintain, let alone learn new skills required for changing applications and services
4th Trend for 2014 – What are the future communications skills required to use, deploy, support future solutions?
- The future is getting harder to predict, design and plan for, particularly as it relates to future skills required to design, deploy, support and even use technology.
- This is challenging across various generations, particularly given the accelerating pace of technology advancements.
We encourage all organizations to look at creative, flexible job programs to help fill the technology openings.
Our suggestions for some creative alternatives to consider below include:
- Provide more flex work, part time programs to leverage semi-retired resources, or millennials who focus on work/life balance priorities
- Develop part time programs to current full-time staff that need time for parent leave, personal health challenges, etc.
- This may be one of the only ways to ensure that both vendors and customers will have enough of the appropriate resources, with employees changing priorities and corporate and personal demands.
Do not hesitate to contact Roberta Fox to discuss further. As always, I welcome your thoughts, feedback and comments. You can contact me at Roberta.Fox@FOXGROUP.ca or 905-473-3369 x 1001.