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An automobile finance company has a Cisco contact center environment that services millions of customers. The internal IT staff has extensive experience in the manufacturing industry, but it remains hands-off with the company’s contact center and lacks the appropriate expertise to manage the Cisco environment.

While many organizations have begun to move Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Center (CC) applications to the cloud, their cloud journeys are nowhere near complete. Organizations in the midst of this transition would benefit from taking the time to build a smarter path to the cloud by developing a comprehensive cloud strategy that addresses their specific business needs. There is no doubt that the cloud is an incredible business enabler that helps organizations realize a broad range of benefits, including:

Customer experience is perhaps the greatest source of competitive advantage available to your company. According to Forrester, companies with superior customer experience grow revenue more than three times faster than companies with inferior customer experience. Greater customer loyalty also abounds, as these satisfied customers will stay with you longer, spend more with you, and recommend you to others.

The discussion around active/active data centers can dovetail into a great number of conversations, from business processes to facilities management. Before engaging in such conversations, it’s important that you begin with an understanding of the business requirements that necessitate the implementation of active/active data centers so that you can determine if such an approach will align with your data center and overall business strategies.

Cisco recently recognized ConvergeOne as its Software Partner of the Year for US West at the Cisco Partner Summit 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. AOS, a ConvergeOne Company was also recognized as the Cisco Execution Excellence Regional Partner of the Year: Prairie States Operation. Cisco has continually awarded ConvergeOne for being a top partner to demonstrate innovation, business growth, alignment with Cisco’s strategic priorities, and commitment to Cisco and our customers.

The new year is quickly approaching, so there is no better time than now to determine your top business priorities for 2019. Need some help determining what these priorities should be? When a previous year’s Computerworld Tech Forecast survey asked IT executives about their upcoming priorities, the respondents’ top priorities included “improving employee productivity/efficiency” (47%), “improving customer satisfaction/experience” (46%), and “containing costs” (44%). These are all important priorities that will greatly impact the success your business finds in the coming year. However, a difficult question emerges: What steps can your business take to fulfill all of these top priorities?

For years, I have been asked about the death of voicemail. It started at the end of 2014 with Coca-Cola’s announcement that it was disconnecting voicemail, which was followed by similar announcements from companies like JPMorgan Chase. What ended up happening in most cases? The companies didn’t actually completely get rid of voicemail, but they did experiment with eliminating it for certain users or groups of users.

Monitoring has proven to be one of the more difficult components of IT for many years, perhaps because we make too many assumptions about how monitoring works and what the monitoring tools we use can actually do. We’ve all been mesmerized by demos at trade shows that boldly claim to have finally “cracked the code”! Unfortunately, after we purchase the tool, take it home, and install it, we begin the long, winding road to disappointment when it doesn’t do what we thought it would do. Alas, the tool just showed well on the trade show floor.

Has your business undergone the transformation it needs to thrive in an increasingly mobile-driven world? Enacting a bring your own device (BYOD) policy and making your employees accessible anywhere, with any device, is a good start. According to a KPMG survey, 74% of executives who work for highly profitable companies say they have a mobile-enabled workforce.

Last week, I wrote about the first five steps to creating a culture capable of effectively defending against modern threats. This week, I'll take you through the next five steps. Let’s dive right in.