A recent discussion thread at Focus.com offers some valuable insight into how best to align IT-related actions at your company with business goals and needs. It also demonstrates how online communities such as Focus can help users to be their own IT industry analysts by connecting directly with other users and experts.

Considerations

Mark, a member of the Focus community, recently asked, “What is the best way to accomplish this vision for my phone system?” Mark said that he has a company of approximately 50 people and “an old but very reliable PBX. My vision is that I want to incorporate all our communications behind a hosted solution but it has to accommodate both cell phones and some type of desk phone as end points.”

Mark received several answers from community members who happen to work for companies that supply modern telephone systems and services. However, Focus Expert Todd Hodgen took a step back and actually addressed the original question directly, instead of leading with any kind of sales pitch. And the Focus community responded appropriately, giving more “thumbs-up” to Mr. Hodgen’s answer than to any other (and giving several “thumbs-down” votes to some of the more “sales-y” responses).

Recommendations

Looking at this idea exchange more broadly offers a view of alignment of business goals with investments in business systems that can be boiled down to three basic questions. These questions also align closely with the Focus Research Methodology and core Focus research documents.

Question 1: Where do you want your company to go?
Question 2: What are the characteristics you should be looking for in your business systems?
Question 3: What are the characteristics you should be looking for in your business systems vendors?

Asking Question 1 is a more generic version of the “vision” element of Mark’s question. It is absolutely essential to know and prioritize your business goals to make good decisions about what you should buy to get you there, and from whom you should buy it.

Regarding Questions 2 and 3, Focus Market Primers and Buyer’s Guides are intended to help you to know your leading options and to identify and prioritize your business needs. These steps help you to prepare to investigate and compare candidate solutions and vendors meaningfully. Focus Comparison Guides are designed to provide the basic data you need to make those comparisons.

In addition, Focus believes that there are some other specific points you should include in your specific answers to Questions 2 and 3. Below is an example list of such points, provided by Focus Expert Colin Earl.

Independence from the Vendor – Business managers or IT staff should be able to extend and maintain the system themselves after training, rather than tying the company to long-term dependence on $200-per-hour consultants. Ideally, the training time should be short. Systems designed to be maintained by the users may require a week of training to reach proficiency, whereas those designed without this criterion in mind may require over a month of training and carry increased effort/risks when making changes.

Adaptability – Once the system has proven itself in the initial deployment, it should be easily extensible to other business areas. So the data models, business rules, workflows, access permissions, and data input forms must be fully and rapidly customizable.

Auditability – The system must be auditable in multiple senses to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations. It must make it easy to show an auditor what a defined business process is, how the system enforces the process, and how the process has been followed in any particular instance. Further, the solution should make it possible to capture and collate data, such as who logged in, what IP address they came from, what records they viewed, edited, etc.

Integration – The solution should include pre-built integration with standard technologies, such as LDAP/Active Directory and MS Exchange. It should also support a robust set of APIs and scripting options, including Web Services. Ideally, even the source code should be accessible – not that you’d want to change it any more than you’d want to use an emergency parachute, but it is nice to have the option.

Scalability – The solution must scale to support thousands of current users, the update of hundreds of thousands of records per hour, and databases containing tens of millions of records, without requiring non-commodity hardware.

Security – The system must support a fine-grained security model for precise access control. The software platform, and if SaaS based, the hosting infrastructure, should be subject to regular security audits from an independent firm and the vendor should make the results available.

Reporting – The system must support dashboards, charts, and reports that provide quick insight into business processes. But passive access to information is not always enough, so it should also support the creation of business rules that provide active notification of any problems.

Standards Compliance – The system should support standards such as HIPPA, ADA, ITIL, and CFR 21 Part 11.

Platform Choice – The vendor should offer a SaaS option so that customers don’t need to provision a server to get going. Once the solution has proven itself, it should be movable to their choice of in-house Linux or Windows server to allow full integration with sensitive back-end systems without impacting the firewall.

Web-Based to Reduce Maintenance – The product should be 100% web-based so that no installation or upgrading of client software is required. It must also support the customer’s choice of browser.

Backups – System backups should be fully automated and include everything necessary to move the entire deployment to another server or to restore in case of disaster.

Upgrades – Upgrades should require little effort and must allow migration from any revision to any later revision without affecting customizations.

Cost – The cost to get started must be reasonable and the product should provide a rapid ROI, ideally within the first few months of use. Getting a reasonably complex production system up and running should be reasonable (e.g. $50,000) and extending the system to cover new processes should be low. The cost structure should be simple and inclusive, without hidden extras or per module or per function charges every time you want to extend the system.

Company Stability – The vendor should have a history of at least 10 years of providing enterprise solutions. For CIOs of large companies, the vendor’s track record with other Fortune 500 companies is most relevant. For start-ups, experience with small companies is of greater interest. The vendor should be financially sound and profitable.

Low Risk – The vendor should be able to describe exactly how the software addresses current business need(s) and demonstrate it running this exact process prior to purchase. The vendor should be willing to commit to a fixed-price implementation for the entire project based on a mutually agreed specification. Different vendors may offer different forms of refund if a project fails, ranging from a credit towards additional software purchases to a full cash refund of all software costs and consulting services. The strength of the warranty indicates the vendor’s confidence in their software and implementation services.

Focus believes that you should ask the three questions described above and answer them in ways that follow the suggestions in the above list, using Focus guides to inform and support your plans. Regardless of your specific business needs, goals and system investment plans, with such an approach you will be well on your way towards maximizing the value of every business solutions investment your company makes.

Disclosures and References

Comment on this Focus Brief

Neal Gilbert

Posted on May 10, 2010

Recommended by:
Michael Dortch

The author has done a great job covering most of the important points businesses should take into consideration when selecting a telecommunications system.

I would add tech support as an additional key feature, especially if you are a small business or do not have an in-house telecommunications staff. VoIP opens up a wide range of features that will allow even small companies to create a state-of-the-art telecommunications solution that was previously only available to very large and well capitalized companies. The problem is, you have to understand how to use these features and this is why support from your VoIP Service Provider is so critical. After all it is their system, and they are in the best position to provide this information.

I have seen many companies implement a VoIP system and simply recreate their old PBX's. This is fine, but they are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to increase productivity and improve customer support (usually without increasing their monthly expense).

The possibilities are endless, but here are a few examples;

1. Hire more remote or home based employees. With a Hosted VoIP system it is easy and in expensive to incorporate these people into your telecom system. All they need is a IP Phone set.

2. Increase tech support hours without incurring overtime. You can easily add support people on the east coast, mid west and west coast. This increases your hours of coverage with out incurring overtime. It also allows you to tap into a wider talent pool. Jet Blue has mostly home based reservation agents.

3. Have a single receptionist answer calls for multiple locations. This is very beneficial, especially if you have several receptionists and none are at full capacity. A VoIP phone system also makes it easy to transfer the receptionist duties from one person to another without the back up person having to sit at the primary receptionist's desk. In fact, there is no need for the person sitting at the front desk to be the person that answers your phone. It has always been this way, but it does not need to be. You could assign the phone answering person to any employee in your organization, including a home based employee.

4. Easily integrate mobile phones into your system. I do not need to give out my mobile number. The voice mail system on our system allows callers to press 0 from within my voice mail box to transfer the call to my cell phone. My cell phone greeting is as follows; This in Neal Gilbert, I am not at my desk right now, but if you leave your name, number and a brief message, I will call you back as soon as I can. If this is urgent, press 0 and the system will transfer this call to my cell phone.

Earlier in my career, I was with a company that had a main office and several smaller satellite/branch offices and were adding new locations on a fairly regular basis. We had to purchase a phone system for each location and manage the relationship with the local phone company. In addition to this being expensive, it was a nightmare to manage. Eventually, we implemented a Hosted VoIP phone system.

The VoIP system allowed us to easily set up the phone system in each of these branches without having to buy a complete phone system. This also saved us the hassle and expense of having to set up accounts at each of the local phone companies.

All that we needed to do was to mail the IP phones to these branches (which are plug and play) and the office has a phone system that was part of the main company phone system including all of the functions of the system. The set up of a new phone system in a branch generally took a couple of hours and could be implemented in a week from the time we decided to add a new branch.

In addition to the ease of implementation and limited costs, there are a lot of benefits that enabled these branches to grow and feel like they were part of the company.

Some of the benefits to the branches were;

1. Employees from each of these locations can call each other by dialing extensions and these calls are free as they were inter company.

2. Each of these branches were able to transfer customers to the main office if that was required as opposed to telling a customer to hang up and dial a number.

3. It allowed a new branch to have the look and feel of a much larger company as opposed to an appearing as an "outpost".

4. A single receptionist can answer the phones of multiple branches allowing the sharing of resources.

These are just some of benefits, including those discuss by the author of this post that are easily attainable by any size company.