As employees increasingly work virtually, collaborative applications and an overall unified communications strategy become more vital. Unified communications gives virtual workers a way to communicate effectively and productively.

In an office, it’s relatively easy for supervisors to call see who is available and call an impromptu meeting. When the team or some members of it work remotely, that task becomes more challenging - unless a quick glance at the presence status on a contact list, combined with a click-to-video or Web conference tool is available.

From an IT staff perspective, getting people to request, use, or fund the myriad of communications applications or even mobility extensions that make up UC has been challenging. This is mostly because they didn’t really understand the benefits until they started using the technology. And that left IT as the evangelists (and usually, the funders) for unified communications deployments.

That’s starting to change.

In our upcoming research, Unified Communications & Collaboration, we asked organizations where their demand for unified communications originated. In 64% of the companies, demand was coming from somewhere other than IT (such as end users or business units). IT was driving the demand in 29% of the companies, and the balance (7%) didn’t have any demand yet.

Finally, we are starting to see a stronger link between business and technology. In some cases, business-unit leaders not only went to IT to ask for a technology-related solution to a problem, they also were willing to fund the implementation.

The key question is why are we starting to see significant demand from end users and business units for unified communications? In part, mainstream media is writing stories about how technology helps businesses run more efficiently. Also, people, in general, are becoming more tech-savvy. The 30-and-younger crowd was raised with computers, and as these folks move into management positions, they are able to influence how their employees get the job done.

It’s refreshing to see such a strong convergence between end-user requirements and IT capabilities.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.