Vendors may be making a lot of noise about unified communications and collaboration (UCC) but the promised panacea remains a pipe dream for most organisations. Despite having been touted as the likely number two strategic technology for 2008 by Gartner, it fell to number five on the 2009 list and does not appear at all in the analyst's top 10 for 2010.

There are fairly clear reasons why organisations have so far failed to adopt the technology to the extent predicted.

To realise the full benefits of UCC requires a major change management effort spanning not only technology but people and processes. In addition, a confusing array of technologies, approaches and vendors, as well as a current lack of standards, leads many to conclude it's better to wait until the market settles down before placing their bets.

As Nick Kirkland, chief executive of IT leaders' forum CIO Connect, says: "Most CIOs I know are considering [UCC] projects rather than doing them."

As a concept, of course, unified comms has a lot going for it. Knitting together disparate communications and collaboration tools like mobile phones, audio and video conferencing, instant messaging and social networking, as well as the concept of 'presence' (knowing where anybody is at a particular time and whether they're online), has vast potential to improve the speed and efficiency of employees and processes, as well as clear cost advantages.

Gartner thinks by 2013 current distinctions among the components of UCC will no longer exist. Jeff Mann, research vice president at the analyst house, recently noted business users typically treat the different technology components of UCC as silo projects. "They can no longer work this way as UCC represents a fusion of different communications cultures and work styles. The artificial separation they are used to will become a thing of the past," Mann said.

So what should organisations be doing now if they want to be best placed to take advantage of this increasingly converged world?

They certainly shouldn't just be throwing technology at the problem, says Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca. "It's not a matter of tools, it's a matter of working processes, the way individuals communicate, the way they're managed, how the organisation is structured, the mechanics of workflow and so on. All of these things have to be understood first," he says.

From there, it's a question of mapping appropriate tools onto those processes. "That's critical and it has to be done in as vendor-neutral a way as possible," says Bamforth.

This is easier said than done. "It involves a complex mix of technical and business skills - and I think most organisations will have little choice but to rely on vendors and particularly their channels to help tie everything together."

But picking partners whose approaches dovetail with your business requirements and processes is tricky, particularly given the current diversity of the market. "There's a whole spectrum of approaches from onsite to cloud-based solutions. Different providers have different roadmaps. Whether you're looking at the integration of Skype, social networking tools, mobile phones or whatever, every supplier is running at a different pace," says Bamforth.

"Ultimately, most companies aren't going to re-engineer their processes just to accommodate some new technology. They want something that fits in seamlessly with the way they work now. We talk about UCC as if it's going to be this glorious pulling together of everything. For many organisations, it might simply be the case they want to get their phone calls for free and make sure people can see who's about - in other words voice over IP plus presence. And certainly as a stepping stone there's nothing wrong with that approach," he says.

For global fuel additives specialist Infineum, the spur for looking at UCC was the need to reduce unnecessary travel, which led the company in the first instance to evaluate videoconferencing products. David Allison, IT leader at Infineum, says: "Initially we talked to the high and mid-end providers like BT and Cisco and saw some amazing telepresence-style solutions where you really had to pinch yourself to be sure people weren't in the room."

But the products all involved considerable investment and risk, so Infineum began to look instead at the lower-cost, webcam end of the market, specifically Microsoft's unified communications suite. "The fact we got that thrown in with our corporate licensing agreement prompted us to pilot the technology and see how things went," says Allison.

"We quickly learned there are a whole load of change management considerations when you're implementing this stuff. How do you schedule a meeting? What are the right types of etiquette and behaviour? Once you get into the multitude of variations associated with web conferencing and how people access the system, you realise there are hundreds of variables - all of which have to be tested," Allison says.

"For example, we found you need preparation time to set up a meeting and you have to adhere to certain protocols. And we learned that the standard Microsoft message when you set up a Live Meeting is just confusing technobabble, so we had to work out how to get into the bowels of the system to change it."

While Infineum is not yet using UCC to provide a single, unified overview of all the company's communications, it has extended its use beyond the initial videoconferencing requirements.

Allison says: "We're using it for presence, whiteboarding and real-time document sharing. And again we're finding this takes practice and discipline. As soon as you get into areas like using flipcharts, brainstorming, etc - it's very hard to get the best out of this type of technology."

Allison is also concerned about the lack of agreed standards. "Ultimately, we want to be able to hook in with customers and suppliers irrespective of what environment they're running on. To truly call itself 'unified', this technology needs to be as interoperable as telephone numbers," he says.

And that openness, agrees Bamford, is likely to be the key consideration for organisations looking to ensure investments they make today don't compromise future competitiveness.

"There are times you might go down a non-standard route for good reasons - as long as you know there's a clear return on investment. But proprietary solutions have a finite lifespan and when it comes to UCC, most organisations should stick with open, or at least common, standards if they don't want to find themselves down a cul-de-sac in a few years."