CEBP is Huge, So Why Isn’t Anyone Delivering On It?

The following is a guest post from Lee Ho, Vice President of Marketing at Esna.

In a world full of technological innovations and exciting new ventures, it’s baffling that a revolutionary concept like communication-enabled business process (CEBP) gets so little attention from the business community at large. CEBP seeks to transform standard communication capabilities by integrating those capabilities into the regular flow of business. This integration produces a seamless communication channel, thus increasing efficiency and reducing human latency – pretty much a no brainer when it comes to optimizing most business practices.

So, why then is CEBP still a relatively untapped gold mine of efficiency? While CEBP isn’t a new idea, it’s still working to find its place in the rapidly evolving business landscape – a place we feel it rightfully deserves.

With an end-goal of bringing a continuous, high-quality, real-time communications experience to the table across business segments – customers, suppliers, employees, management – it’s hard to understand why so few businesses have yet to embrace this concept.

The Rise of CEBP

Everything from traditional and digital phone systems to IP telephony, video and web conferencing, IM and more make communicating with colleagues, business partners and customers easier. However, these systems often exist in silos. Early proponents of CEBP quickly realized that these systems became more powerful when used together. In other words, when a company leverages these communications systems within their existing business processes and infrastructure, they create efficiency for the business as a whole, which is the essence of CEBP.

Failure to Launch

While CEBP is an extremely powerful concept, it has yet to take off in the mainstream. The most likely reason for CEBP’s so-called failure to launch probably lies in the failure of the communications industry to properly distinguish between unified communications (UC) and CEBP. While many organizations do and should embrace UC, the industry’s failure to highlight the unique benefits of CEBP have probably slowed adoption of the practice.

The main difference lies in CEBP’s tendency to operate by triggers or events like reminders, alerts, and notifications embedded in existing UC services. The resulting process is not only an integrated experience, but a seamless one with reduced latency. This in turn produces a strong ROI across a wide array of business sectors.

While CEBP produces immense benefits in the long run, setting up communication-enabled business processes up front takes time, effort and capital. You must integrate disparate systems across departments to truly build an effective system. So, if the benefits of CEBP aren’t highlighted beyond those of UC, many organizations might not feel such an investment to be worthwhile.

Has your organization embraced CEBP?

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Esna is a global leader in cloud-enabled unified communication and collaboration solutions. Esna integrates cloud, mobile and social communications on any device and with business applications from Google, Salesforce, Jive and others. For more information, visit esna.com.