Day 2 at Global Connect here in Grapevine Texas starts with an opening keynote from Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski, as well as Tom Hughes, CIO of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). After Tom spoke, Nortel CMO Lauren Flaherty and Gartner Group analyst Bob Hafner joined Mike and Tom on stage for a panel discussion.
For those of you wondering about the details behind why Tom Hughes of SSA is speaking, the U.S. Social Security Administration is just beginning a massive move of their 1,600 offices to VoIP using Nortel equipment. You can read more about that deployment here.
Here are my notes from the session. Updates below are in reverse chronological order, with the most recent updates at the top. Mike spoke first so he’s at the bottom of this list, then Tom Hughes of the SSA, then the panel discussion (on top):
And the event has wrapped. Again, start from the bottom and read up.
Question from the audience: Nortel’s ICA with Microsoft, what’s going to happen long-term with that relationship to ensure the success and tight integration with Microsoft? Mike Z: There is no such thing as a relationship forever, you have to continue to show customer value…and so far we have shown real benefits to customers with Microsoft. For us it’s about what we can do for the customers in this room.
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Lauren for Bob: When you looks at drivers for users making those business cases, how much is around CSAT versus productivity? Bob: It’s all important, but at the end of the day it always has to have hard numbers and cost reductions. It has to pay for itself. There is the one exception where there is a PBX at end-of-life and you have to do something.
Lauren for Mike: Can you comment about how much of our business is software and where we are going? Mike: we have always incorporated software into our hardware. Our development used to be 50% focused on software, in the last few years that has grown to 70% or more.
Question from the audience: We are a gov’t agency and we host a lot of critical applications, my question is around security with UC — to Tom, as you migrate to UC will you manage the devices or will a vendor manage? Tom: you can’t do everything yourself. So you have to build trusted environments with your partners. Then you create an audit trail. And you’re going to find problems, and then you fix them.
Lauren for Bob: What are the benefits of UC? Bob: the problem is that when the IT department goes to the CIO and says they want to go to UC, they have a hard time showing hard numbers. Every single customer we talk to says they have to have a hard dollar benefit to get UC approved.
Question from the audience to Tom: What’s your advice to the incoming President? Tom: trying to get me in trouble 
The President is trying to organize communications, and that’s happening. There are a lot of challenges around communicating across the federal government.
Lauren for Tom: If you had to give lessons learned that you would change, what would those be? Tom: I think the lesson is to keep the execs engaged because of the macro investment you are making to your organization. If you don’t think about changing your business processes you won’t be successful. If you don’t engage execs up front, if they don’t see it, you are going to fail. Build at the highest possible level, because you are really talking about changing your business.
Lauren for Mike Z: we see UC deployments from 100s of seats to 1000s of seats. How are big deployments like Tom’s evolving things? Z: Where SSA is different is that they are deploying VoIP to a contact center that is at the heart of their business. There are challenges that we expect, but you address those and then you can go to the next level. In the bigger scheme, we’ve had large UC deployments with a number of companies globally, and those examples need to be championed to drive the move to UC.
Z for Bob: are there two or three best practices that you think businesses should take? Bob: Yes, first you want to find a business process that is very communications intensive — for instance a process that needs a lot of approvals. And then, don’t try to boil the ocean day one…look for very simple opportunities to start with. Lauren to Tom for more input. Tom: for all these items there are other things to think about, legal, HR, security. The issue is that you are going across different verticals of your organization — you have to work horizontally across those domains and that’s the hard part. So starting small on something that you agree to deploy is a good way to start. People are generally risk-averse.
Lauren for Bob: we speak a lot about integrating comms into business processes, can you talk about that? Bob: we started thinking about this in 2003. In the past 40 years we have been computer-enabling business processes. But what happens when the computer spits something out and someone needs to make a decision? There is a delay in business process while someone eventually makes a decision. Now when we move to VoIP, that’s another application, so now you can integrate that communications application (and others like IM, email) into the business process. It makes sense and it’s the next step.
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