Collaboration tools & social media

My number one cost saving tip,’ says David Tebbutt, Programme Director at Freeform Dynamics and author of Green IT For Dummies, ‘would be cutting out travel and accommodation. You can substitute a lot of travel with seeing people or collaborating using a shared white space.’ There are a lot of ways companies can do this, from looking at unified communication tools like IP Multimedia to make collaboration with workers in other sites easier, to using SSL or IPSec VPNs to allow remote workers secure access to the internal network.

 

Tebbutt also uses social media tools also to form and maintain relationships, inverting the usual paradigm of meeting in person then communicating online, and advocates integrating these tools into the business, which can be easy for companies with younger employees for whom using these tools is now ubiquitous out of office hours. However, he explains, don’t expect those who are new to the tools to grasp them immediately, or for everyone to accept changes without question.

 

 

IP Multimedia is a fully managed, network-based service, IP based voice (VoIP) and video communication platform offering a range of messaging capabilities (from virtual whiteboards to videoconferencing), which make it the perfect choice for large or dispersed organisations looking at areas like hot desking and home working, ‘There can be an initial outlay, yes,’ admits Alistair McKinnon, Senior Product Manager at ntl:Telewest Business. However, he says, there is a real business case for the move. When the communications manager and the finance director look at the true costs of running their own system of PABX or IP PABX, and compare that with IP Multimedia, he has found, they can actually see that a networked managed service is comparable, and often cheaper. Its cost saving impact can be felt right across the organisation, for instance supporting flexible working initiatives – which can reduce staffing costs and allow you to widen your recruitment catchment area by supporting home working. It can also help a changing business to avoid relocating people, traditionally a very costly project.

 

This has a great potential to reduce costs, and is a technology that can be embraced relatively cheaply, says Mark Neild, Managing Consultant and communications cost reduction expert at PA Consulting. As a well-established technology you’d think everyone would have already adopted it, but they don’t, he says. Time to think again. Be sure, however, to educate staff on how to use the new phones, he warns, in order to realise the true benefit.

 

Capital expenditure is currently an issue for some organisations, so for those customers it will be important to ensure that the payback period on any investment is very short, says Alistair McKinnon. ntl:Telewest Business will help with this if it can, he says, to ensure as little “setup CapEx’ as possible. ‘We’ll show as much flexibility as we can.’ What’s crucial is to communicate openly with your account manager about what you would like to put in place regarding telecommunications, data or convergence, as well as any restrictions you currently have regarding finance: ‘Don’t assume that you can’t afford to do whatever you would like to do. We may be able to surprise you, and help you put in place the means to make further savings.’

 

To take one example, many UK contact centres and multi site organisations could benefit by reducing their reliance on costly customer premise equipment, which is time consuming and difficult to manage, and are now moving to network based solutions, so that they can concentrate on their core business. Because managed Contact Centres are available for an affordable monthly rental charge, you won’t tie up capital in set-up or maintenance costs. There’s no capital expenditure required and you don’t need a dedicated in-house team to manage the solution for you.

 

If there was one word of advice I would give,’ says Neild, ‘it would be to ask employees their views on how they could work smarter, and make use of that. In the vast majority of organisations there is a lot of fat still out there, and in many cases people are working incredibly hard.’ He advises couching the query as: ‘What can we do to help you to not have to work quite so hard; what are your thoughts on how we can do that?’ ‘That usually gets a very positive response and we quite often find that we can cut out things that people don’t value, and which don’t make any difference to the customer.’ This means, he says, you can deliver pain-free cost reduction without affecting the services you deliver – or the morale of the people who have to deliver them.

 

It’s a mature technology that can lead to cost savings and great flexibility, says Alastair McAulay, cost reduction expert in PA Consulting’s IT group, but beware of unrealistic expectations. Some vendors are selling this solution on the basis of laboratory results, whereas the reality is less black and white. One danger, says McAulay is of ‘server sprawl’, which results when it’s so easy to set up a new virtual server that organisations set up a raft of them rather than making the best use of each. ‘In the old world,’ he says, ‘an organisation would be managing, say, 500 real servers. Suddenly, they are managing 1,000 virtual servers sitting on top of 300 real machines. There’s a price to pay in there.’

 

Harness social networking inside and out of your company. Next generation, high bandwidth networks such as those provided by ntl:Telewest Business give you the option to use innovative collaboration and social networking tools, both to boost internal collaboration and to reach out to customers and potential employees. While sites like Facebook and Twitter can be time-wasters when used recreationally, they can also build strong relationships with customers if handled with care and an eye to measurable results.

 

For example, a corporate Facebook page or Twitter feed can alert users to your new products or offers, advertise job vacancies to those particularly interested in your sector or industry, gather feedback from existing customers and answer queries from potential ones. Where you successfully establish a Twitter presence, you can gain incredible word of mouth. These users are ‘hyper connected’, ‘influencers and really want to share opinions with others,’ according to Jeremiah Owyang a senior Forrester analyst. As at March 2009, 30% of Facebook users were aged over 35, so you’ll be reaching beyond the traditional student audience.

 

Engaging a dedicated monitoring agency, such as Radian 6, means that you get real time reporting of company mentions on Twitter, and can act upon them quickly, for instance offering support to someone posting a complaint or discounts and incentives to those who have favourable things to say. Of course, where customers and clients are involved, you’ll need a dedicated resource to respond quickly and accurately to any communications in a professional way, which will incur some cost of its own. To counter this, ensure that you put methods in place to measure what the Twitter effort achieves, for instance in terms of customer issues addressed and repeat business.

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