A Tale of Two Cultures

Where do the telecommunications people sit at your company? If your company is large, they may have their own department. If it is medium-sized, telephony duties might fall to a couple of bright souls housed in the facilities, human resources, or accounting department. If your firm is quite small, your telecom staff might consist of a single administrator—whoever showed the most aptitude when the need arose, with an external contractor’s phone number on speed dial.

Or, if you’ve changed to VOIP or voice over Internet protocol, in which voice and data networks are combined, your telecom experts might sit in the IT department—which is much more life- and business-altering than it sounds. Although it might not be apparent to outsiders, there are personality differences between the two groups that can lead to difficulties when they must work together.

In the future, as VOIP becomes the across-the-board standard, up-and-comers will be cross-trained in IT and telecommunications.

“It’s like learning a second language for both of them,” says Pat Campanaro, director of sales at Voice & Data Networks, Inc., a telecommunications service and equipment firm in Edina. “It’s very, very hard. Telephony is my heritage, and in my experience, the bonds between telecommunications organizations and end users have always been very close, because dial tone is seen as a God-given right. If anything happens to it, immediate access [to assistance] is imperative. Shots are called from the bottom up. From the IT side, although they have grown to be very much in tune with end users and departments, they have always tended to call the shots from the top down.”

It’s not that IT people are less concerned with users, says Mike Haigh, partner at Haigh, Todd & Associates, a telecommunications management firm in St. Louis Park. It’s just that telephony has been around a lot longer, and during that time, a different set of expectations has formed. That has led to a different way of approaching IT work. “It’s not uncommon for people within the data network support area to upgrade the operating system of a router in the afternoon,” he says. (Routers are devices that direct data flow over a network.) “If a router goes out of service for an hour and a half while they’re doing this, it’s not that big of a deal. But if a portion of a voice network goes down, it’s unthinkable. [Telephony people] just wouldn’t work on it during the day. So there’s a real difference in philosophy on when and how you do work.”

What are the expectations for a job well done? Data networks are usually engineered to a standard called “best effort,” which means that based on the capabilities of the network, an application will be delivered as well as it can be delivered. But phone service is delivered according to “quality of service” standards based on prioritizing different types of data flow over a network, i.e., maintaining the quality of telephone calls that share a network with credit-card transactions. There is no official definition of quality of service. Telecommunications companies and their clients agree upon a quality of service level that works for their particular situation.