Is unified communications (UC) vendor hype or essential business tool? Enterprise pilots are now almost universal – CIOs tell Forrester that UC is a top IT priority, and only 13% of enterprises recently surveyed had no plans for UC. But vendor proliferation, confusion about standards and problems with business case development are all major barriers. We suggest five principles to help enterprises navigate through this mire:

Develop a strategic plan for Unified Communications (UC) as part of an IT strategic plan. Every CIO needs an IT strategic plan to set business expectations, establish credibility with the firm's executive management and bring coherence across IT. Without a strategic plan, IT is at a greater risk of failing simply because the myriad of decisions made across the organisation and over time will not have common goals or agreed paths to these goals. This creates an organisational ambiguity that feeds a "workaround" culture. UC is a now a core part of IT – along with collaboration and information management. If you don’t have an enterprise-wide plan for UC, you will end up with dead-end silos and waste money.

Build a business case based on cost savings. Productivity gains are nice to have, but in today’s challenging economic times, your finance director is only interested in how IT can save money. IP telephony will reduce operating costs, and built in voice conferencing facilities will cut your conference bridge bill. Video conferencing will help you reduce your travel bill, and UC features like softphones will enable people to work at home when they need to.

Involve business leaders in decisions and vendor selection. Because UC feeds collaboration, business leaders take an impassioned interest in UC and its impact on the productivity and success of their teams. Today, business unit leaders are taking a more active and powerful role in the selection of UC solutions, with 58% of UC decisions being heavily influenced by the business buyer. This trend can only increase, so work with business leaders who can champion the use of the technology. UC vendors will have to adjust their selling strategies to address this new buyer group. UC integration with business applications, such as the joint development between SAP and Microsoft or IBM, will drive the business value for UC deep into the business.

Bring in outside professional help to help you design the UC and collaboration architecture. System Integrators will be well positioned to win many UC deals because they have the relationships and skills that many other industry participants do not — and they have a deep understanding of industry business processes where UC and collaboration will have the biggest impact. Systems integrators have relationships in place with business executives and can interact with those business leaders as strategic advisors. UC and Collaboration software can help you to innovate by changing and streamlining business processes – this is what you need to focus on, not easier to use voice and video.

Leverage your existing vendor partnerships. When money is tight, a phased migration plan is not just good sense, it is the only practical way forward. If your existing desktop vendor is Microsoft, then Office Communications Server is probably right for you, if IBM then take a good look at IBM’s Lotus Sametime. The differences between vendor functionality will not justify a move. If you have a dominant PBX vendor, migrate to their IP voice solution – this choice will maximise the continued use of existing equipment until you need to replace it. They are all working hard on interworking with both Microsoft and IBM. Polycom and Tandberg have great interworking capability with older videoconferencing systems; leverage your existing installed base. Adopt an open standards-based strategy – no one vendor is best at everything, and this approach will enable you to keep your plan flexible.