Communications capabilities are essential to the success of organizations everywhere. Voice, email, text messaging, multimedia messaging, file sharing, streaming video, conferencing, collaboration, and more – you can’t do business without them. But as traffic volumes and the number of communications services in use continue to grow, so do the IT and operational challenges.

Communications services have historically been provisioned by, and are of course still widely available from, broadband landline and wireless carriers who seek value-added revenue to offset the commodity nature of their “big dumb pipe” core businesses. But there are also numerous third-party solution suppliers, private implementations, and unified communications (UC) product and service capabilities. In addition, an increasing number of cloud-based services – many of which are often aimed squarely at consumer end-users rather than organizations – are seeing significant organizational application, and unfortunately often via backdoor or shadow-IT routes.

This robust array of alternatives has created an organizational communications-services landscape that is both large and complex, with challenges related to cost, reliability, interoperability, compliance, management visibility, and security that absolutely must be addressed.

What’s the difference between overall organizational success and results that otherwise fall short? Often the differentiating element is the strategic application of multi-modal, high-availability communications capabilities.

But with so many staff members now working remotely or otherwise mobile, and with BYOD (bring your own device) a more-than-significant element in the provisioning of both communications devices and services, it’s critical to understand demand, options, and solutions strategies that can produce the best results in any given case. There are two key elements at work here, as follows:

These essentials lead to a number of key considerations that every organization must consider, as follows:

Building an appropriate communications solution set, as we noted above, can be very complex. There are two key sets of strategic alternatives here, as follows:

Three additional considerations enter into the above decisions, as follows:

As we noted above, having an organization-wide communications policy in concert with both organizational objectives and IT capabilities is a first step, just as is the case with BYOD and security. Solutions must similarly be in concert with this policy, and with no exceptions.

Once the communications policy is in place, a solution set can be assembled and aligned with the general framework we introduced above. In general, the process here will follow that which is typically applied to all IT services, including a requirements analysis, service set definition, long and short lists of candidate products and services (and, increasingly rarely, new internal development), and experiential analysis and evaluation via alpha and beta tests. The rollout of the solution must be accompanied by consciousness-raising, education, support, and monitoring for management visibility with respect to both the policy and the solution. Once again, IT must reinforce the importance of using only approved channels and facilities and avoiding difficult-to-impossible-to-monitor out-of-band solutions, including social media.

In the big picture, we expect the role played by carriers in communications solutions to decline over time, in favor of Web- and cloud-based OTT solutions. This is a very-long-wave transition to be sure, and essentially remakes communications services as facilities that run over the commodity carrier pipe rather than as value-add from the carriers directly. It is very likely that some carriers will offer their own competitive OTT communications services, but we believe that this will be rare due to the business-plan disruption that results from such a shift. But disruption here is going to occur regardless – we can even foresee the day when purchasers of new wireless handsets will buy only a broadband plan, without voice or messaging services that are today bundled with the device without exception. Decoupling services from the big dumb pipe will also help facilitate the end of cross-carrier, cross-device, and cross-OS conflicts that are still an unfortunate element in communications services today.

The future, then, is a world of three-stop shopping: devices, broadband wireless connectivity (both wireless WAN and Wi-Fi), and value-added communications solutions implementing a very broad array of possible alternatives and levels of integration. We should also note that the most important direction here is in the direction of highly-integrated mobile unified communications (MUC) services, which hold the potential to indeed unify all required communications capabilities under a single product/service and management umbrella.

For the time being, though, the framework we’ve outlined can help enterprises prepare for the upcoming ultimate merger of IT, networking, and telecoms, and help facilitate the transition to a much more manageable, cost-effective, and productive future for organizational communications overall.

This story, "How to tame enterprise communications services" was originally published by Network World.