Over the last several weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with numerous enterprises about their communications and collaboration plans. While there is a growing interest in unified communications, and enterprises increasingly see the benefits of real-time collaboration, organizational issues remain the primary hindrance to adoption.

Unified communications offer significant opportunities to improve communications, both internally and externally, streamlining business processes, improving customer response, and shortening sales cycles, but they force enterprises to radically rethink how they manage communications within their organization. Most enterprises are still struggling to integrate voice and data teams, and often groups responsible for communications and collaboration applications such as instant messaging, web conferencing and shared workspaces remain independent entities, operating on their own, without coordination among other related groups.

In a recent conversation with one enterprise, I was surprised to hear that while the voice and data teams worked on plans for migration to VoIP and unified messaging, they had not consulted with the IM group -- which had its own plans to deploy an enterprise IM application which offered integrated voice and video. This failure to communicate could have led to redundant, non-integrated systems, resulting in higher costs and a management nightmare. (Think of the scenario when the help desk gets a call that the voice chat capabilities in Microsoft Live Communication Server 2005 aren’t working, only to call the voice group and be told that the voice managers have no idea what the user is talking about.)