Becoming a Dynamic Enterprise

Xavier Martin offers his insight into the challenges enterprises are facing in today’s turbulent business environment and how becoming a dynamic enterprise helps address these problems.

“One way to address competitive challenges while increasing collaboration is through Web 2.0”
-Xavier Martin

Globalisation is transforming competition into a fast moving target. The competitive landscape changes every day, enabling new and innovative services to be launched rapidly, creating an unanticipated threat for enterprises. We believe the companies that will succeed in this global market transformation are the ones that interconnect their core assets – namely their network, people, and processes – with real-time communications to harness a hidden wealth: the knowledge of their employees and partners. Knowledge is the real competitive differentiator that no one can copy. We call these companies "dynamic enterprises".

One way to address competitive challenges while increasing collaboration is through Web 2.0. Its services are increasingly important for a company's performance and we believe that they will become the "de facto" foundation for collaboration. Knowledge is probably one of the most scattered resources in an organisation, and this phenomenon cannot be fixed through business applications.

Enterprise objectives are less about technology and more about positively influencing its business performance. Our vision is that IT departments will shift from technology houses into internal business service providers, delivering the digital weapons to help their business units gain market share and become more profitable. This implies that CIOs need to focus more on the essentials. Two trends will emerge:

• All-IP, service-aware networks will become the norm, supporting applications from the core (or the carrier's point of presence) to the device, which is not possible with heterogeneous technologies, and
• Managed communications services models will be favored for OPEX-based deals.

We believe carriers will play an increasingly important role in helping organisations be dynamic.

Unified Communications simplifies communications

Unified Communications (UC) has been perceived so far as the crossroads between the telecom and the IT worlds and, in many cases, companies have struggled to demonstrate a clear ROI. We believe that the UC market as we know it today will transform into what we call "contextual communications", where real-time communications offered by UC techniques will be embedded into composite applications that aim to serve specific business needs. UC's role will not only be to simplify communications, but rather to make sure that there's no latency in communications between people during critical business instances, such as a sales negotiation. Then UC's contribution to business will become indisputable.

Increasing customer satisfaction

So far customer service excellence has been the primary vehicle to measure customer satisfaction. In some situations, customer service agents' skills are not sufficient for providing the right answer at the right moment, (first contact). Organisations should consider expanding customer service beyond the contact center walls, by integrating company experts into the process. For example, in our Genesys offering, we provide agents with the ability to reach an expert during an interaction with a customer through the integration of presence-based UC and collaboration features embedded into their screen pop-up application.

This is a single market and integration naturally happens as long as a company understands the combined value of the components of a dynamic enterprise: network, people, process and knowledge. We're used to getting a dial tone and internet access. Communication now has little value, it's almost a commodity. However, if companies consider it part of a broader scope, which puts business imperatives at its centre, then it becomes a real differentiator in a Web 2.0 world where collaboration is the name of the game and will be for many years to come.

Xavier Martin is is VP of Strategic Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise & Vertical Markets – a position he has held since 2002. Prior to this he was WW Marketing Director for Contact Center Solutions, Communication Applications and Unified Communication solutions. His career includes 20 years of management experience in software solutions, database management systems, business intelligence and contact centres.