The Consumerization of the Enterprise!

The Consumerization of the Enterprise
C. Dubois Listen to article
From connecting to collaboration, the professional communications environment is becoming increasingly complex: enterprises need to deliver an enriched customer and employee communications experience, improve market share and generate revenue growth while improving productivity and ROI.
This edition of Enriching Communications examines how enterprises and public sector organizations today are responding to global pressures to deal with increasingly dynamic end-user behavior. At the same time, they must drive growth, improve efficiency and deliver an outstanding customer experience in a profitable manner that delivers shareholder value. In this issue, we explore:
Growing workforce mobility and the need to be connected anywhere, anytime and on any device in a seamless manner.
The drive to increase productivity — as an individual in a private context and as a professional within an enterprise or government agency.
Blurring distinctions between personal and professional life: how individuals manage a working day and deliver on personal lifestyle and professional objectives.
In today’s world, we operate in a 24/7 economy, and we are moving from a vertical (command and control) hierarchy to a much more horizontal (connect and collaborate1) “global village” paradigm. This is certainly applicable to enterprises, and we are seeing similar challenges in the public sector.

This issue of Enriching Communications details the experiences of enterprises and service providers who have implemented various strategies and technologies. These articles offer insights into how organizations can leverage investments in communications technology to succeed in this challenging environment. We demonstrate how we at Alcatel-Lucent are deploying our own solutions and what our specific experiences are in the Enabling Enterprise-wide Collaboration article by our CIO, Elizabeth Hackenson.
Alcatel-Lucent offers a range of products, solutions and services to enterprises, government and the public sector. We offer turnkey integrated communications solutions tailored to each customer’s stringent requirements. Examples include service-aware networks; business communications; customer and employee interaction; disaster recovery systems; hosted and managed services; and Managed Communications or “telecommunications on demand pay per usage.”

Enterprises
Companies are adjusting their strategic plans to deal with the shift from an asset-based economy to a knowledge-driven global market environment. Knowledge creation is a multidisciplinary and collaborative process. As a result, data management is becoming much more important than in the past, creating a need to increase internal processing capabilities, partner with specialized companies in this field or even consider the full outsourcing of non-core activities. Nowadays, managing sales and marketing requires a high degree of specialization and updated systems able to deal with consumer insights, market segmentation, brand management, flexible pricing, multi-channel strategies and so on.
While enterprises today continue to deal with such business constants as performance improvement, innovation, revenue and profit growth as well as customer satisfaction, they now mostly operate in a more competitive and global environment. Moreover, they face customers who are able to express their opinion and user experience via web portals. This can have a positive or negative influence on prospects and loyal customers and certainly needs attention.

Industries and the Public Sector
To some degree, there are similar challenges facing government and public service organizations. For instance, less than 10% of hospitals in the United States have implemented electronic medical record-keeping as a core component of their technology strategy for health information2. The majority of primary-care physicians continue to scrawl out diagnoses and complete healthcare transactions with paper and a pencil! Such a business state is unsustainable in today’s end-user-centric environment because it is ineffective, expensive and prone to error. More importantly, given the context, it can potentially cost lives.
Similarly, an educational environment without e-learning is simply unthinkable nowadays. We believe this trend will migrate from simply sharing information via voice and data toward video – for instance via IPTV.
Interestingly enough, local governments are undertaking standard checks into the handling of customer requests for things such as taxes, housing regulation or general information. They’re looking at phone response times as well as the ability to guide the customer to the most appropriate agent.

Business-Critical Communications
Communications are "business-critical" and key to the viability of an enterprise. Alcatel-Lucent focuses on business-critical communications solutions that simplify communications networks to address enterprise communications requirements easily and efficiently. We do this by leveraging our extensive cross-industry knowledge, research and innovation, robust go-to-market support and strong partner ecosystem.
In the articles that follow, we address strategic and technological topics such as new business models for converged communications; why vertical markets need industry-integrated communications; and how network transformation projects can help to achieve strategic results. All of the examples are supported by various initiatives with channel partners and our customers. Among our many references around the world — numerous customers such as the four testimonies included in the magazine — testify to our highly innovative solutions. You will find four recent customer cases described in the magazine.
OVUM Analyst Chris Lewis expresses his views on today’s key topics within enterprises, looking beyond connectivity and reaching toward ways in which telecom operators and channel partners are credibly able to partner with enterprises.
We report on the findings of the study Business in motion: Managing the mobile workforce, commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent and produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It examines the current state of affairs in workforce mobility; the outlook in five years’ time; and how our products and solutions will correspond to today’s and tomorrow’s market demands.
The notion of workforce mobility as it relates to Alcatel-Lucent’s architecture and solutions are elaborated in the technology article Enterprise Mobility. Other topics addressed from a technology perspective are Winning Strategies for Delivering Premium VPN Services to the Always-on Enterprise and Light Up Optical Fiber to Support Business Critical Communications.
To address these rapidly evolving business environments, we must explore new business models and identify new revenue streams. This is the focus of Capturing New Revenue Streams with GPON, in the extended online version of this magazine.

Conclusion
Enterprises are changing rapidly because they operate in a very competitive global environment. They have the potential to enter new markets and connect with prospects they could only have dreamed of a few years ago, thanks to new ways of connecting. Today, employees — who are in effect end users — are hyper-connected and always-on, tech savvy and well aware of their place in organizations. They use similar devices in their personal lives when they are not at work, and as such are increasingly demanding ease of use, functionality and reliability, as well as the ability to customize their experience and maintain connectivity.
Over the next few years, it is highly likely that enterprises will deploy Facebook- or MySpace-like features to reach and remain relevant to customers and target communities; deploy a YouTube-like approach to share end-user experiences or customer testimonials; and follow eBay’s example of creating ecosystems that are made up of integrated partners in a multi-channel sales strategy. It will not be out of the question for a business to deploy an iPhone-like device to stay connected and manage conference calls and video conferencing.
Is this far away? Hard to tell, but I for one am excited about the new possibilities, synergies and untapped markets that these new tools could allow enterprises and public organizations alike to reach and achieve. I invite you to gain some insights from the pages that follow and consider how this consumerization of the enterprise could impact your business.

1 © 2005, The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
2 © June 2007, “6 Trends to Bank On” by Tom Gardner, Fortune

Cor Dubois is Vice President, Leader Business Critical Communications Top Marketing Program. CMO, based in Paris, France.

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