Oh, for a crystal ball.
Love, life, the winning lottery numbers: we wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.
Instead, as we negotiate the often turbulent and always unpredictable nature of our roads ahead, we have to imagine where we are going…and, more importantly, plot (and then repeatedly re-plot) our path to where we want to end up.
In business, that means having the bravery to push the ‘change’ button when it is pertinent to do so, whilst having the vision to simultaneously hedge your bets.
Future-proofing, if you will.
It’s a tough trick to pull off for every business, but when technological advancement is perpetually influencing a disproportionate number of your KPIs, keeping pace can easily bamboozle.
A new innovation here; a faster process there: each one capable of positively transforming the way you operate – but each one requiring sometimes not insignificant investment.
“With investment comes risk, and no business likes taking risk,” says Mike Nowak, Senior Vice President of Sales at US-based global mid-market managed services provider BCM One (pictured, above).
“Remote communication has massively increased due to the pandemic and will continue to do so in any new hybrid model going forward,” adds Nowak.
“Many businesses’ legacy phone systems are struggling to keep pace and, meanwhile, modern unified and collaborative communications platforms have and are developing.
“Microsoft Teams is a great case in point. People have become hooked on the user experience internally and they now want to start calling via Teams externally too. That’s fine for users of the basic functionality but there are gaps, such as missed call functionality, re-routing, and extension dialling.
“Switching everything to Teams is therefore not necessarily the right thing to do, so many businesses freeze and end up doing nothing. While they wait, the contracts on their old technologies are automatically renewing and they get stuck with platforms and equipment that is hard to integrate when they ARE ready to move.”
It means that, for the smarter organisations, unified communications in general – and UCaaS in particular - must now be part of the wider strategy rather than just an operational tool.
It then becomes a question of ‘path dependency’ – and that’s where the opportunities get really interesting for end users AND the channel.
“Renewing an outdated technology can really hurt a business because things change so quickly,” says Nowak. “It’s like the business that invested in a new fleet of typewriters in 1988.
