Most businesses consider Enterprise Architecture (EA) just a blueprint that outlines their operational structure. Other businesses, usually larger in size, have a dedicated EA department that ensures that the blueprint is executed effectively.
Enterprise Architecture department looks after abilities, controls, and execution of processes, information, applications, and technologies that are permitted to various business departments, designations, employees, etc. In the simpler interpretation, EA department takes care for what different departments do in giant businesses.
Since it is one of the latest business practices and that too practiced among the large businesses, there is a great scope of improvements with it. One can expect to witness changes that can earn more followers than critics. Streamlining of the VoIP services and cloud-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) can easily be those favorable changes. Talking about larger businesses, they must have got a VoIP service that works locally, but taking it to the cloud is what makes it more EA-friendly. Here is how hosted PBX adds more flesh to EA department.
Organized Business Structure
For a business that has a fine hosted PBX setup working, different branches at various global locations remains at a minor distance of a few digit extension dialing. But that ease-of-connectivity is not all that matters from the perspective of EA department. Structuring and organization of the call flow and routing in the branches hold a noteworthy consideration for them. McKinsey considers that EA should reflect organization of the business. So, who connects to whom and via which paths is determinant factor of organization structure. Hosted PBX gives just that.
Affluently laced to flexibly route the calls, Hosted PBX can connect all the departments as they need to be. It enables a vast control on the connectivity of all the extensions with each other and external callers. Permission to enable (or disable) the calling to certain extensions allows the fine-tuning of overall structure for the business. All this can be brought into effect via a central admin login panel and adds to the simplicity of the setup.
On the top of that Hosted PBX allows the multi-level routing. This means executives, managers, etc. have a specified routing level. Further permissions for the monitoring (or listening to) can also be given to certain level. Precisely, this gives a complete control for the organization of business, which is pretty modifiable as well.
Collaboration Intensified
Maintaining and providing the collaboration solutions to the various departments is a responsibility of EA department. Depending on the services that the business serves, requirement for the collaborations between the employees can vary radically. Video conferencing to realtime collaboration on a document file to Instant Messaging, the variations with such needs can keep on growing as the technology progresses further. For any giant business the collaboration needs inflate beyond just voice or phone calls and obviously, Unified Communications is in strong demand among businesses for genuine reasons.
However, all these collaboration options get better, productive, and responsive with the aid of voice. Fortunately, hosted PBX is a VoIP-based service, which is compatible with a number of other communication means. So, an enterprise architecture looking for perfect unified communications solution will have to depend heavily on the services of hosted PBX.
Voice is primary and natural communication medium for the employees and no matter how innovative other mediums develop into, VoIP based solution will have always have a role to play. Most of the other platforms demand a dedicated space on the network while VoIP deliver the voice messages almost instantly even in the lower bandwidth networks. So, hosted PBX can even get along with the other platforms conveniently.
Strategize, Analyze and Evaluate the Processes
Improvements arrive with continuous assessment. Businesses, larger in size and more complex to control, face more struggles than skills when it comes to the calculations of the performances. The business world had been relying heavily on the services of software, like- Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), etc. to meet these tactics. They do serve, but there are certain loopholes. Hosted PBX, again, can mend up these loopholes.
CRMs and ERPs are software developed to automate the processing of the various business related operations even in the most complex structures. With the increasing dependency of businesses on calling operations for sales as well as support needs, business runs heavily on the PBX and other VoIP-based services. Thus, the overall business planning involves calling operations as well and it increases the pressure on EA department further.
The ceaseless and herculean task for EA department can ease to a considerable extent with the services of hosted PBX, because they can be integrated with CRMs easily. But that is not all. VoIP-based solutions are built to deliver the best marketing ambiance. Firstly, they are easier for campaign setup, as per the strategical needs of the business. Secondly, they offer a massive monitoring and analysis edifice to keep a track on how the campaign is performing. Then, report of the performance is updated in realtime –offering very detailed reports to check the performance of agents, teams, departments, branches, etc. Being a cloud-based solution, Hosted PBX avails these resources to EA department without any restriction of device, location, or time.
Wrapping Up
Aspirations from EA department are soaring high. However, their ability may be limited unless they are provided an impeccable communication network to all the required nodes of the business regardless of the distance between them. Hosted PBX delivers exactly that. It may not serve as the only communication tool for businesses, but it can certainly serve the large chunk of connectivity needs and integrate with many others tools. Being instant, customizable, and omnipresent, it turns out to be most reliable technology for EA department to bank upon.
Renuka Rana, Editor at AceCloudHosting spends considerable part of her time in writing about technology including cloud computing, Smartphones and QuickBooks Hosting. When not writing, she loves to dig deeper into knowing the best and the latest technology in industry.