Is your network helping you meet your business objectives? Do you see it as an asset or as a burden? Networks need to evolve to better support business goals and new initiatives.
The following assessment can help you decide how well your network is meeting your needs today and how well positioned it is to meet the needs of the future.
Note: this tool is intended to guide decisions and stimulate focused conversations about the evolutionary path for your organization's network. For a complete assessment of your needs please contact your Bell representative for the latest information on our offerings or request to be contacted by a representative.
Performance and reliability
The network is the nervous system of the organization. Research shows that in mid-tier to large enterprises, the average cost of one hour of application downtime is about $45,000. Communication infrastructure as a whole gets far more use than any one applications, so you can imagine the accumulated costs of sub-optimal performance and outages.
How much performance are you sacrificing because of your network? Ask yourself:
- How many minutes of outage have you had in the past 6 or 12 months?
- Are systems performing as quickly as they could be and do you have the right metrics in place to know?
- Has peak bandwidth demand grown substantially over the last year and is demand always being met?
- Do you have multiple networks for separate applications (e.g. data, voice) and if so, how many?
- Is your network configured to reduce latency with email to voicemail, call routing options, desktop click-to-talk or other features?
- What factors do you expect to influence demands on the network over the next five years, and by how much – organizational growth, growth of your customer base, increased use of high-bandwidth applications (e.g. video, peer-to-peer) or other factors?
- Can your network now handle that demand and how do you anticipate providing for continued growth in demand?
Improving management and cost controls
Provisioning network infrastructure, bandwidth, services and administration – the costs adds up. But there are many ways to minimize the burden of administration and keep costs in check: new data transfer protocols, traffic prioritization and making use of network provider capabilities can deliver a substantial payback.
Consider the following:
- Are you up to date on service providers' technology capabilities? Harnessing these can prove more economical. Take hosted IP Voice, for example, with features like single number reach, mobility integration and soft client capabilities for teleworking
- Are you implementing quality of service (QoS) in order to make current bandwidth levels go further?
- Are you managing everything in-house – from security to multicasting to wide area network (WAN) administration, or have you found that it makes sense to outsource specialized tasks?
- Can you calculate how much your network costs you per business transaction and what plans do you have for reducing that cost – outsourcing / third-party solutions, consolidating multiple networks (e.g. voice and data), or reducing demand?
New applications and improved business processes
Demanding goals. End-of-life equipment. What combination of new equipment and applications will provide the optimal path forward? It all depends on your objectives. If you are a service-oriented organization, you might want to reduce performance delays and improve customer access to information and applications. For manufacturers, choices could be driven by the need to provide better tracking and inventory of corporate assets.
Consider the following:
- Do you know the location, condition and lifecycle status of all corporate assets?
- Have you structured data to allow for a single source of information to provision multiple communication channels?
- Are you able to empower the customer to choose their preferred method of communication?
- Do you provide sales and shipping staff with up-to-date transactional information?
- Can you support online customers with live assistance?
- Are you improving business processes based on contact centre speech analytics?
Increase flexibility and productivity of employees
Unified communications tools, mobile access, voicemail-to-email…all of these things will have an impact on productivity. The question is, where do you start – by improving the basics, or with new convergence tools?
Following are questions that can help point you in the right direction:
- Have you built use case scenarios to find out what will have the greatest impact? A use case scenario builds a business case around the ideal setup, application by application. For example, with mobile devices, a use case scenario determines the most effective way to check voicemail – e.g. a sound file attachment to email, or a consolidated landline/mobile voice mailbox.
- Have you identified the use case scenarios that most tightly tie in with the business needs around being connected?
- Can you measure the business impact/value of improved access to email, voicemail, teleworking, top applications used in the business and high impact communication flows such as instant messaging?
- In each case, does it make good business sense to bridge the gap between the current reality and the ideal use case scenario?
- Have you mapped use case scenarios against the different technology options? Some technology components are common in the industry, while others may be unique to one supplier.
- Are you aware of the adoption rates and timing of the various technologies on the vendor roadmap? Critical elements to understand are the integration points between current and future systems, open standards and operating support capabilities.
Talk to us
You have taken the time to answer these questions, but what does it mean? For help interpreting the information you have generated with this tool, contact your Bell representative today or request to be contacted by a representative.