DoD out in front with unified communications

The Defense Department chief information officer, John Grimes, signed a memo in January calling for the military to begin testing using the Internet for all communications.

The Unified Communications Strategy describes DoD's end state and how they were going to get there, according to Cindy Moran, the Defense Information Systems Agency's director of network services.

"We know now what the end state is," she says.

DoD's decision to begin implementing unified communications - even on a limited scale - puts them in front of many federal agencies.

A recent survey by CDW-G of 150 federal IT decision makers found 70 percent say they are still in the planning and assessing phases. 61 percent of the respondents did say they have a business case for unified communications or it is part of their strategic plan.

Pat Scheckel, a senior director of solution practices for CDW-G, says the definition of unified communications was one of the things they asked about in the survey.

"Unified communications is the idea that agencies unify policies, approaches and user experiences around voice, video, web conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging and telephony," Scheckel says. "Organizations are coming at it from many different perspectives."

The survey found that 51 percent of federal respondents say they have fully deployed unified audio conferencing, while 31 percent say instant messaging and web conferencing have been fully deployed.

"We are not quite over the hill of the fat part of the bell curve, but we are approaching it," Scheckel says. "We see a big wave coming in the next 18-24 months of agencies deploying these systems."

Scheckel adds many agencies are going to move to these technologies for several reasons. The first is because the different components are easier to integrate, especially since many use open standards.

Another reason is the benefits agencies see around continuity of operations and disaster response.

"The technology used to be siloed with conferencing or telephony deployed by itself and not integrated," he says. "Having a unified communications system lets you get messages of critical nature to many people at once because you can broadcast it through an emergency notification system that works on phones, e-mail, SMS text and other ways."

Of those surveyed, 43 percent say COOP is a major benefit of unified communications, while only 27 percent of the non-federal respondents say disaster response is a major reason for implementing these technologies.

Scheckel says many private sector organizations see the benefits of these technologies as reducing costs and improving productivity.

The survey also found that feds are concerned about the network security associated with unified communications.

Scheckel says agencies should know what they want their end state to look before they start down the path of deploying unified communications.

"No organization is doing this or few are doing this as a big bang approach so you should leverage what you have and upgrade some components where necessary," he says. "Once you pick the approach, set the timeline and associated costs."

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On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio - Unified Communications Center

CDW-G - Survey press release

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