As Government organizations strive to simplify business processes and unify their multi-Agency, multi-site operation, the concept of centrally managed, but geographically disperse, voice and data services is making more economic sense, but is still technically challenging.
There is a general acceptance that the Government sector requires the latest enterprise features, including unified communications (UC). Inter-Agency collaboration brings the prospect of improved operational efficiency whilst enhancing system performance to enrich the constituent experience. But disperate networks, means large amounts of systems integration to deliver Government-wide UC benefits.
Government institutions are looking to access a full suite of UC services, but still operate with the economic and operational advantages of a centrally controlled infrastructure. CIOs want the cost benefits of a central platform, but agency IT managers do not necessarily want to give up the independence of operating their own administration.
The challenges that government agencies are facing, include:
- Consolidation of multi-generational platforms
- Diverse vendors, disparate legacy systems
- Making cost savings by sharing a centralized infrastructure, but maintaining autonomy for individual agency administrators
- Supporting both shared and dedicated infrastructures
- Effective management of disaster situations
- Ability to scale easily
- Providing a platform to efficiently deliver new UC applications
As government agencies strive to simplify business processes and unify cross-agency systems, the concept of shared services is under careful consideration. There is a general acceptance that government agencies require the latest enterprise features, including unified communications (UC). Inter-agency collaboration brings the prospect of improved operational efficiency whilst enhancing system performance to enrich the constituent experience.
Government agencies are looking to access the full unified communication suite of service, but still operate with the economic and operational advantages of a centrally controlled infrastructure. Agencies want the cost benefits of a central platform, but do not want to give up the independence of operating their own administration.
Government agencies want to capitalize on the potential of IP-based communication solutions to improve information sharing and collaboration within and across organizational boundaries, with the goals of increasing operational efficiency and enhancing government services. To achieve this, agencies need to upgrade their existing telephony system to a standards-based platform that supports unified communications (UC).
Many governments are also considering centralising the management of their IP-based communication solutions, and outsourcing to an internal service provider, or a 3rd party.