Bridge the Gap Between IT and the Business with WAVES

At ConvergeOne, every collaboration engagement follows the WAVES Methodology. The first step is a Workshop that helps our customers take an “outside-in” view of their environment. In other words, the Workshop allows our customers to first view the expectations from the end user’s point of view (the “outside”) and subsequently consider the technology’s capabilities (the “in”) being provided to meet the end user’s expectations. This outside-in approach works equally well for all user-facing services like customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC).

The WAVES Methodology and its deliverables address the key issues that most IT and business executives struggle to manage. They are faced with competitive, financial, and operational pressures but lack the tools to evaluate complex collaboration technology solutions so that they can make objective decisions that are founded on well-reasoned business facts.

WAVES can resolve the issues that are common to the IT and business communities. IT/Telecom organizations frequently operate reactively in response to business needs. This is often due to cultural issues (e.g., “because it’s the way we have always done things”), misunderstanding or having no real knowledge of business needs, or simply lacking the internal resources needed to plan future services. They often don’t have the ability to proactively build relationships with their internal customers and this results in a lack of confidence in IT’s ability to understand or respond to the customers’ need. To resolve these issues, sometimes all that’s needed is for the business, IT, or both to receive guidance from an external, objective expert. WAVES provides this guidance and bridges the gap between IT and the business.

From the CX and UC vantage point, the WAVES Methodology establishes tangible IT/Telecom benefits in terms that are recognizable to the IT/Telecom and business executives. For the CIO and technical team, it provides the details necessary to fully understand the recommended environment – the architecture, design, operation and support parameters, and resource and personnel requirements. For the business executives (e.g., COO, CFO, CEO, and Board), it establishes the solution’s strategic value, business impact, and investment requirements in tangible terms:

• Strategic value metrics are associated with enterprise-wide initiatives like growth, competitive positioning, time-to-market, and brand. 
• Business impact establishes the solution’s influence on various internal performance indicators, such as productivity, effectiveness, quality, customer satisfaction, and retention (employee and customer). 
• Investment requirements addresses the issue of cost and provides an accurate comparison of what the current-state environment will cost over the next 48 – 60 months in comparison to the proposed solution.

The compilation of data from these three areas establishes the foundation for a true business case. It supplies clear data that either validates or refutes the solution. And it does so in the language of the business and IT executive. Further, the deliverables resulting from each step in the Methodology are specific and reproducible. They provide the business executives with the information they need to understand the business need, reasoning, and impact of each recommendation.

DIVE DEEPER WITH A WAVES WORKSHOP

With ConvergeOne’s structured workshops, we take the time to identify the information we need to collect and assess to determine the most impactful items for your organization, make the right recommendations, and share them with you in a clear and concise, business-friendly report. Register today for a workshop to get started on the path to true digital transformation.