Back in January a questionnaire on Unified Communications was published.  It feels like both a ‘blink of an eye’ and also ‘an age ago’ that the article was posted.  The survey was open for 2 weeks to capture the results, and I apologize that its taken me over one month to get around to posting the results, but better late than never…

Question (Answer – average across responses)
How many people are in your main team? (15)
How many offices/locations does your team cover? (7)
Is your team within one country or across multiple countries? (50:50 split)
How would you define your team? (Exec / Start-up 9, Sales 10, Technology/Research 9, Marketing 7, Consulting 6, Development 7, IT 4)
In addition to your main team, how many other teams are you part of? (3)

With 30 responses we have enough to drawn some reasonable conclusions.  The mix of teams is broad from executive teams, sales (top category) through to IT.  Surprisingly the number of people in the main team is quite high at 15, with most teams distributed across multiple offices (7 on average), and about half the teams including international members.  The respondents were also members of 3 other teams.  This clearly shows communications is essential to team performance, and that teams provide a viral way of spreading communication services within organizations.

Below is the response to the question on what communication tools people use.  Its clear people use a variety of tools, with mobile voice and email dominating.

On the question of how much communication with your team is done when either you or they are outside the office? The average was 56%, over half of the communication is when people are not in the office, backing up the critical role mobile plays in team communications.

Then on the questions around current smartphone and unified communications (UC) awareness.  Half use the iPhone, one quarter RIM and the rest are a mix of Android, Symbian, and others.  Most people are aware of UC, and consider it more marketing hype than a well defined service.  Most liked feature in UC is voice-mail to email, with a broad range of issues on current UC solutions from poor UI (User Interface), lack of presence integration, etc.

On the difficulty in contacting colleagues, interestingly there was a 50:50 split between those who have a problem and those that don’t, with 50 mins gain per day in time amongst the group that have a difficulty in contacting colleagues.  There’s obviously a group that likes being chased, and a group that does the chasing within teams.

There was strong endorsement of most of the features discussed in the questionnaire see below, even by those that do not have difficulty in contacting colleagues; with presence features being top.  Additional feature requests focused on integration into the enterprise, additional presence features, and quality of experience.