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Today’s CIOs are responsible for implementing and managing numerous technology
solutions in their business environments.
And of course, as any CIO understands,
along with these responsibilities comes
pressure to realize as much value as
possible from technological investments.
Among the many solutions we see our
clients implementing, three in particular
stand out as potentially challenging for
CIOs to deploy and manage successfully:
Lync, SharePoint and FlexPod.
Our experiences and discussions with our
valued clients have made clear that when
businesses are able to use these solutions
to their maximum potential, they achieve
significant gains in productivity, efficiency
and profitability. Conversely, when CIOs
struggle to establish organizational certainty
around how best to use these technologies,
they lose time, money and, unfortunately,
sometimes the trust of other company
stakeholders.
So what are some of the pain points
surrounding the three technologies?
Let’s take a look:
Lync: If an organization leverages disparate
systems for different modes of communication—like video or conferencing—it’s not
all that surprising that end users may be left
feeling frustrated and confused. Similarly,
if a business has a UC solution like Microsoft
Lync, but doesn’t plan for proper training and
user adoption, that business may needlessly
sacrifice the productivity gains it could have
otherwise achieved. Disparate communication systems and poorly adopted UC
solutions create unnecessary cost and
complexity for a business.
“If you have Lync today and you also have
a different third-party PBX, it doesn’t make
financial sense for both things to stay in
place over the long term,” explains Kevin
McCarron, Director of Atrion’s Business
Innovation Group. “If you have two communication platforms that do the same
thing, you not only make things harder
on your users, you are paying twice.”
SharePoint: Organizations can experience
a number of difficulties with SharePoint, but
among the most common are deployment
challenges and a lack of organizational
understanding about how best to utilize the
solution. Are you in that boat? Too often
employees are made to feel that they must
use SharePoint to justify the company’s
investment in the solution—even if the
system was deployed improperly or they
have not received the necessary training.