The Evolution of Collaboration Technology through Time

Hernandez, Director of Information Technology, The Larson Group

Hernandez, Director of Information Technology, The Larson Group

Your collaboration project has made it to the top of the enterprise “priority” list; and now the VoIP landscape has changed since COVID. If it’s been a while since a major technology uplift in collaboration like it was for my team, it is incredible how different the conversation is today than it was the last time we took on this project. There are many new considerations and concerns for organizations as traditional “phone systems” have evolved, to the point that the old project planning and operational initiatives are barely recognizable. VoIP phone and collaboration have become deeply embedded into our desktop interfaces, work applications, file sharing, conference room systems, and secured external meeting spaces. On top of that, there is also a new expectation to have all of this collaboration delivered at a minimal cost and even more minimal invasiveness from your IT support staff after implementation.

While I believe that COVID did accelerate awareness of remote office technologies, especially among non-technical managers, I also believe that many of these applications like VPN, Secure File Sharing, RDP via HTTPS, and voice with video applications were already in a state where they were readily available and very easy to use prior to 2020. For the technically stronger companies, all had previously implemented an entire stack of collaboration applications like these or at least a solid combination of a few of them. In doing so, a large portion of their user base had already been functioning remote for the years with this tested technology that was well established and easy to use for many daily job roles.

Because the ability to work remote and connect was readily available for this group, I suspect many did not take the opportunity to “market” these applications throughout their organizations or create training awareness programs for its functionality. The technology was casually being used in accounting, marketing, sales, IT, and administration for a long period of time. The thing that did change, however, was that once the COVID crisis hit, companies experienced an immediate need to add new employee groups to a remote worker classification. Suddenly these technologies had a bigger audience and immediate new relevance in the workplace. I recall in “post COVID” conversations with senior managers and how they were “very impressed” with how rapidly these collaboration web suites and remote security vendors had improved their product ease of use, all due to the COVID rush for remote work. The truth is however, that many of the technologies that we were already utilizing in our organization saw very little changes, if any, in features and functionality for the user experience. The new reality was that a population of less savvy users, who were coming to us in droves, were all forced to learn how to utilize these tools overnight. IT departments everywhere were faced with a new challenge to help change the way people perceived their office and work life. This meant training a new level of users that we’d never had to train before and with very little resistance or push back; it was all out of necessity.

“If you want to talk about a huge bar being raised for enterprise technology teams and their collaboration suite, this perceived inexpensive “zoom” mentality raised the bar on what is expected across organizations as well as within our own households”

In no time at all, organizations had users who were now operating with this remote ability and connecting virtually using tools that were all brand new to them. On top of this, they were not just connecting, but were “hosting”and “leading” virtual meetings, sharing documents, sharing desktops, and drawing on white boards to an audience who was even less than technically savvy than they were. One of the biggest influences for their shift in thinking was how families, grandparents, grandkids, and other non-technical users also were actively engaged in standing up meeting spaces on whatever web platform they chose and were doing it very easily and very inexpensively, or even free. In some cases, this was so easy that payment, platform, security, and quality was never even crossed the minds of COVID separated families. If you want to talk about a huge bar being raised for enterprise technology teams and their collaboration suite, this perceived inexpensive “zoom” mentality raised the bar on what is expected across organizations as well as within our own households. This has changed the expectation for what collaboration space should include, the ease of use, and how much we should pay for it.

As I thought back to a time prior to 2007 and the advent of the first iPhone, most enterprises IT groups were delivering better mobile phones, better laptops, better internet, and better technology to users than they could buy for their home and personal use. That all changed in the years following 2007 and that gap has continued to grow since then for consumer technology and enterprise IT teams. Consumer electronics have continued to get easier to setup, cheaper to purchase, and have grown in the number of choices due to the ease of getting connected today. This continues in every facet of home IoT like security, video doorbells, thermostats, connected appliances, and any handheld gaming device or console that we unbox. Users now come to work and voice their disapproval because their home devices and home internet far surpass what the company can now afford to give them. This same gap in home versus work has now begun to widen for web meetings and collaboration after 2020.

As my team and I gathered around the table for the start of many discovery sessions, I noticed the tone and direction of our conversation had deviated from previous conversations that we had on this same topic twelve years ago. Back then, my team and I were tasked to replace independent legacy phone systems across 20 mixed retail locations. All of these locations contained PRI Long Distance, POTS, complex and dated PBX systems, and miles of dated low voltage 66 blocks that all needed to be updated badly. The goal for my team was to remove the expensive fractional PRI circuits, replace the legacy infrastructure with two redundant IP systems, consolidated between two data centers, but be able to centrally manage both systems. The focus for my team was to come up with a plan and be able to justify the project with a solid ROI. We’d want to deliver SIP to both data centers keeping both in an active state and allow us to establish a centralized configuration and do so while maintaining uptime and security through the migration. As part of the ROI, a vast majority of front-end effort was spent calculating how many fractional circuits that we could replace, how much long-distance reduction we would see, what network circuits we would be required to upgrade, and if our network switch environment was updated enough to handle the new load. At that time, prior to SD-WAN, we would also have to assess whether we were ready to manage QOS across the WAN and LAN or would we have enough bandwidth to handle extra traffic for store-to-store calls. Once the ROI was proven, the next seemingly easy part of the project was designing call flows and routing efficiencies that best improved the customer experience. All this said, nowhere in that first-generation project did any of our users imagine an entire suite of collaboration tools beyond their traditional phone conversations. They could not have imagined a desktop IM client with click to dial, chatting with employees while on the phone, “one-click” meeting to invites, or even the possibility that they would not have a physical phone on their desktop. All of this technology was, so far ahead of what they expected, and the old concerns that we spent so much time working on are all a ”given” for anything that is available today.

So now there is a new set of upgrade project considerations after all this convergence is most definitely not limited to:
• How has your business workflow changed?
• How has your internal and external user collaboration changed?
• How do your managers gauge success and train their workforce?
• How have your customers changed in the way they want to be interacted with today?
• Has social media merged into your customer service?
• How many new avenues of contact do you have today above and beyond someone picking up the phone to call your main number?

Like many companies, we’ve reached the end of the road for our current solution and the current upgrade path is being sun set so we’re in a position that we need to make the decision. How do we, once again, implement technology that our users don’t currently know that they need but they would not be able to live without it six months after we have it implemented? The way companies approach this next decision could very well set their foundation for how well they position themselves to handle the next evolution of collaboration.