Doing more with less is an absolute necessity in the current economic climate. Budgets are being slashed – McKinsey estimates 74% of companies have or are looking to reduce costs as a direct result of the recession. The CIO has to choose where precious resources must be applied to sustain the business and enable agility and innovation.

In these tough times, however, many organisations are maintaining, or even increasing, investment in collaboration initiatives that enable their employees to work more effectively with colleagues, suppliers, customers – and sometimes even competitors.

The rationale for this is a clear focus on cost-saving. The reduced travel costs alone can be huge for a large global enterprise holding fewer face-to-face meetings – in just 12 months, retailer Tesco saved more than £14 million through audio conferencing.

Companies had been realising the cost-savings from unified communications technology, such as audio conferencing and telepresence, long before the global recession began. And although voice and web conferencing tools have been shown to account for significant savings, recent research by Forrester shows that at the top end of the scale, telepresence can reap a return on investment of 47 per cent for dispersed organisations over five years.

So while global economic troubles persist, demand for this level of return on investment will only continue to grow. But if CIOs are to invest precious resources in collaborative initiatives, they will not only want reliable data on cost-savings, but also on the other business benefits unified communications brings.

Identifying cost-savings

Getting the collaboration ergonomics right from the outset is crucial if an organisation is to reap the full return on investment. At BT, we are helping companies understand where they will see savings – and exactly how big they will be – by using our Business Value Calculator. By providing clients with quantitative and qualitative data, they can see the impact unified communications will have on individuals, business processes and the technical infrastructure.

Knowing where and how big both the hard cost-savings and non-financial benefits will be can help CIOs decide whether a unified communications solution is right for their organisation. For a pharmaceutical company, for example, the cost and time to get products to market is immense. By using the calculator, the company can identify how much human latency could be reduced by unifying its communications. This would then enable it to understand how much unnecessary time and cost it could cut out of its business process.

Although it’s clear that potential cost-savings alone are likely to win the case for collaborative, unified communications technology in the boardroom, examining collaboration purely on the basis of cost reduction misses a vital point. Focusing wholly on the cost benefits of collaborative technologies ignores the vast amount of hidden value that these tools can unlock: the potential gains to be made through increased productivity and improvements in business processes.

Revealing hidden value

There are plenty of impressive statistics that demonstrate how collaborative technology can turn downtime into productive time. For example, as a result of embracing unified communications and collaborative ways of working, the UK government has helped the London Borough of Sutton council increase productivity by 30 per cent, while in the US the National Science Foundation found that 87 per cent of managers reported an increase in productivity by employees who could work flexibly.

However, it’s not simply a question of giving employees access to mobile devices or applications. What organisations must do is identify what processes they want to improve and pinpoint the outcomes they want to see. It may be that speed and decision making are factors that are dragging down a company’s service levels. In which case, the use of intelligent embedded presence technology may provide the answer: users will no longer waste time by trying to contact someone who isn’t available.

Extending this unified communications technology into contact centre operations, for example, can yield significant benefits as front line staff have access to (and visibility of the availability of) experts and knowledge which previously would have been hidden deep within the business. This closer integration enables improvements to first contact resolution rates, reducing cost and at the same time improving customer satisfaction.

Benefiting the environment

The environmental benefits that unified communications technology brings should not be overlooked, as sustainability will continue to be a key business issue. While noting earlier that Tesco made significant cost-savings by deploying audio conferencing, it should not go unmentioned that the business also saved 2,446 tonnes of CO2.

Perhaps the best example of where unified communications technology has been used to deliver all of these benefits is an innovative project outside of a traditional business environment. The Southbank Sinfonia, Britain’s best known orchestra of young professionals, recently harnessed the power of TelePresence to hold UK regional and international auditions to join its ensemble.

More than 140 would-be members were able to audition remotely for the judging panel in London without leaving their home cities. Not only did it save time, reduce travel costs and the environmental impact of 140 candidates descending on London, the wideband spatial audio and ultra high definition video experience met the standards required for a professional music audition.

So as unified communications technology continues to stand up to the ever more challenging demands thrown at it, the real opportunity lies in identifying gains beyond cutting costs. Achieving the dual goals of sustaining the business and delivering real agility will make unified collaboration something which will no doubt be music to any CIO’s ears.