Most organisations have been using a variety of collaboration solutions for as long as they've been in business.
As technology has progressed, organisations have embraced first audio then video conferencing as a means of communicating with customers, partners and employees. These modes of communication have progressively been enhanced in quality and combined to give customers broader solutions.
But what can be overlooked in implementing these solutions are the ongoing costs associated with them.
In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Michael Helmbrecht, Chief Operating Officer at Lifesize, said that organisations get caught up in making a choice without understanding what it's going to take to deploy it, support it, manage it and train users across all their sites around the world.
“Whether that's at their desk, on their mobile, in a conference room, or in a hotel room, they don't know whether it will scale and whether the IT organisation can manage it properly for people, because the solution may not be capable of that,” he said.
“It may not really be an enterprise-grade solution that's designed to work that way or that's well-engineered to work that way. And they buy into the vision that says ‘okay, this is going to very cheaply solve that problem’, but they create more problems for themselves and become very dissatisfied, very quickly.”
Helmbrecht added that such situations rarely end well for employees and IT organisations because they don't know what they've signed up for.
“Often the solution can scale but does it so inefficiently that they then have to hire more IT people and internal support people around the world to manage all their sites”
These extra costs are not part of the initial financial model. Organisations thinking a solution would be cost effective then face unsustainable costs because they can’t afford all the people it takes to make it effective. This leads to running the solution and not supporting it but somehow hoping people will still use it and be successful. “That happens and that is a reality in the marketplace.”
Better Lifecycle Management
For Helmbrecht, another issue where he sees organisations get into trouble is even worse. It is where organisations may not have the opportunity to assess what a solution will actually cost in time and money to manage, over its lifecycle.
