Communication and Collaboration Drive Digital Transformation

The goal of digital transformation is to make your company more productive, more efficient, and more data-driven. You can't do that if your employees can't even connect with each other or your partners and employees. Whether you're just at the beginning of your digital journey or looking for ways to optimize and increase its ROI, moving to a comprehensive unified communication and collaboration (UCC) platform can make all the difference to your overall transformation initiative.

For one thing, doing business in the age of the distributed workforce requires you to have the right tools to connect colleagues and customers no matter where they are. To get things done, your employees need access to multiple modes of collaboration, from audio, video, and chat to conference rooms, screen sharing, and webinars. But the key is providing them the right set of tools that play well together and enable them to work with minimal friction.

We recently partnered with Ovum Research to survey over a thousand IT leaders across the globe. We uncovered some interesting trends about modern collaboration built to meet today's business goals. When we asked how many communication and collaboration tools they had deployed across their organizations, 39% said they had four or more – and in that group, 8% said they had more than seven. No wonder they're having a hard time delivering the same consistent, up-to-date experience to every user! Reducing complexity by consolidating on a single platform gets the technology out of the way so everyone, everywhere, can focus on doing great work.

An integrated suite of cloud UCC services also brings huge efficiency to your IT team. Deployment and user management is easier and more cost-effective to manage than multiple freestanding software licenses and hardware components. A licensing model that gives flexibility to the user and simplicity to IT is key. A single ecosystem lets IT set up individual users with only the features they need while still letting them share information seamlessly and collaborate without barriers. Your IT team will manage fewer user tickets while paying only one bill.

Finally, innovative UCC providers are creating ways for companies to make more interactions more actionable, more effectively. When your organization can capture everything that happens in a meeting, no details slip through the cracks. You can find and share critical points quickly for review, assign next steps easily, and automate the follow-up process – so your meetings are more productive and move you closer to your business goals.

For some companies, adopting a single UCC platform is the ideal test case for proving the potential of a broader digital transformation. For others, it's a logical part of modernizing or migrating other business-critical systems. Either way, it protects and enhances the way you communicate and collaborate – which is, in the end, impossible to do business without.

Read the full whitepaper for more information on how UCC tools can drive business into the future, including 10 imperatives to a successful UCC transformation.

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Originally published in July, 2019 on CIO.com.