By Joel Hackney, President, Enterprise Solutions

Successful businesses have always adapted to change, and with the current talk of a recession, the rate of change in the business climate and the need for adaptation, are both increasing. As President of the enterprise division of Nortel, I frequently meet senior executives of enterprises and organizations all over the world to discuss issues and share thoughts on how to harness change in their business and in their competitive environment. In this article, I'll share my views on unified communications as a way to make an organization faster and more capable of adaptation, and therefore as a method to create differentiated value.

Many of my interactions with CEOs have taught me that challenging economic times are many things, but most of all they are the time to make a strong company even stronger. The process improvements that accelerate the speed of business, and the technologies that improve collaboration across mobile and distributed employees are great platforms to do this, especially while others are delaying their IT investments. With all the outsourcing and off-shoring of transactions, business processes and manufacturing functions over the past decade, the skills to engage in negotiations, conversations, knowledge sharing, judgment and ad hoc collaborations are now becoming core competencies for today's enterprise. Unified communications enhance these skills and amplifies one's effectiveness. Unified communications offers a method to increase the speed of a decision, use the customers' time more wisely and seamlessly integrates communications into a companies processes and services. In fact, that's been my own experience at Nortel where the deployment of unified communications accelerated our business processes such as field sales, product development and tech support while strengthening our collaboration skills with partners and customers.

This acceleration happens because employees can reach the right colleagues or partner at the right time and customers can reach subject matter experts quickly. For Baylor Health Care System in Dallas, Texas, using unified communications has improved the X-ray management process cut the patient wait time for X-rays by 50%, reduced time-to-diagnosis, and raised the level of patient care.

But, the real 'kick' comes when the communications applications are injected directly into the business processes themselves. The Orlando Health System accelerated its average patient discharge process by integrating communication into their clinical applications by automatically and seamlessly engaging the authorizing physician to discharge patients in a timely manner. By optimizing facility usage Orlando Health has also generated $11 million in new revenue. This is how you create a competitive advantage. This is the power of unified communications. This is how you accelerate the speed of business.

Financial executives are particularly concerned about protecting the cash balance of the enterprise. That's where packaging options such as hosted services, managed services or pay-as-you-go utility pricing can be leveraged to conserve that cash position while gaining the benefits of Unified Communications technology. This is the best of both worlds - bringing all the process improvement into the business through communications integration while preserving cash.

For Nortel, the business case for unified communications delivered in spades: More than $12 million annual savings with a 10-month return on investment for our 30,000 globally distributed employees. The real estate and operational savings for teleworkers - workers at home - can be as much as $12,000 per user per year. And, if the teleworker only works from home one day a week, they can also prevent 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over the course of a year.

Other research in mobile unified communications shows significant business improvement post-project:

• 29% higher customer satisfaction (CSAT) since employees are more accessible.
• 27% higher employee satisfaction (ESAT) since employees spend less time waiting.
• 20% more time for mobile employees to do their jobs.
• 18% more sales as a result of shorter proposal cycle times.
• 18% more time for desktop-based employees to do their jobs.

As a final note a recent case study I read from the retails sector highlighted how a 5% increase in ESAT correlated to a 1.3% increase in CSAT and a 0.5% increase in revenue. In short, Unified Communications can be a CFO's ally.

For many COOs, improved efficiencies in the business are extracted by new and improved business applications. Nortel has extended the evolution of unified communications by leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services technologies to rapidly create new communications-enabled business processes.

For example, integrating communications with our supply chain process helped Nortel reduce order-delivery cycle time by 27%, improving customer responsiveness. Creating external events-driven and communications integrated applications is how an investment bank can monitor the stock market and should significant changes occur automatically trigger a multimedia conference call to the appropriate participants based on availability, location and preferred method of communication. These are two examples of how integrating communications directly into the business process can improve the efficiency of the business and create a new level of competitiveness.

Leveraging the chaos of challenging times to simplify and accelerate human-to-human communications are high multiplier investments because they impact the most frequent and most important business processes, and because competitors too often delay such investments. That's why unified communications presents senior executives with a rare opportunity to step up the competitive 'heat' in core markets and create long-term value for shareholders. That's why now is the best time to act on unified communications.

Table 1 - Three perspectives on Unified Communications

	CEO	CFO	COO
Goals	Strategy Growth Talent	Cash Return on assets Compliance	Speed Efficiency Repeatability
Impact	Accelerate decisions and collaboration Create competitive differentiation	Improves cash flow Utility or hosted models conserve cash	Simplifies business processes Accelerates processes
Did you know?	UC strengthens competitiveness through business acceleration Research shows UC delivers up to 29% higher customer satisfaction and 27% higher employee satisfaction Orlando Health realized $11 M in new revenue with their UC deployment	Saved Nortel saved $400/employee/year with UC UC project payback can be as short as 12 months	UC has helped Nortel realize 27% faster order cycle times Faster human response to computer-tracked events Baylor Health Care System cut wait times for x-rays by 50%