It's often said that tomorrow's successful businesses will be those that can best deal with change. The question for businesses today is therefore how to accommodate change into the very fabric of their organization to ensure they are one of tomorrow's leaders. How can they turn today's increasingly fast-paced business environment into a competitive advantage, not a threat?

Today, successful businesses are extended enterprises uniting employees, suppliers, partners and customers on a global network. These businesses are inevitably highly complex structures where decision making is distributed and dynamic. And they face diverse and increasing challenges, whether economic or geographic, which impact on business performance.

A wide variety of IT and communications solutions are currently available to help firms become more agile and better able to cope with change. Yet these tools are also currently changing fast to support the extended enterprise's business needs. The extended enterprise's IT and communications solutions must as a minimum enable effective collaboration across a firm's employee base, and the communication processes such technology supports must be integrated into the organization's business processes to optimize business success. IT and communications systems must align totally with the needs of the extended business.

The integration of communications into the fabric of business operations and the transformation of how employees use communications tools throughout their working day are the keys to tomorrow's business success. Communications tools are the key to allowing easier and more successful collaboration between geographically dispersed individuals and groups, enabling organizations to leverage their employees core expertise to make faster, better and more informed business decisions. Firms that successfully achieve these goals will be best placed to become the leaders of tomorrow.

Building Business Success
Increasingly unified communications (UC) and collaboration (together known as UC&C) are being seen as supporting the routes to future success. Although apparently relatively simple in concept, UC&C is however a hugely complex area and demands a radically different implementation approach compared with traditional IT and communications solutions. In short, with UC&C everything changes; if UC&C is implemented effectively, this is all for the best. But UC&C implementations need to adapt often long entrenched organizational processes to align conceptual complexities with business realities.