A Tale of Two Cultures

“Voice is very time-sensitive, and it has to be done in a regimented fashion of orderly delivery of packets [of data],” Haigh explains. “So it’s very intolerant of things like latency and jitter.” Jitter and latency are terms used to describe quality of a telephone conversation over a data network.

“When data and voice start sharing the same pipes, the data network engineers have to start engineering and managing their network differently because of the new application,” Haigh says. Certainly IT staff can engineer and manage the network to support the new voice application; the difficulty is that every time they touch something else on the network—be it security practices or disk partitioning—they now must be concerned with how the changes might affect the delicate new telephony application residing there. There’s no denying that it adds to their workload.

That’s where the expertise of telecommunications experts can come in very handy. But it’s not so simple to forge a meeting of the minds. For one thing, the telecom folks will be climbing a steep learning curve of their own as they gain understanding of how familiar phone capabilities are delivered via an unfamiliar infrastructure—a data network. And for another thing, the data people may be loath to share their turf.

“We have had situations where the data guy says things like ‘There’s no way I’m going to let that phone guy touch my data network,’” says Randy Bilderback, sales engineer at Minneapolis-based communications company Onvoy, Inc. “I try to set them at ease by showing them that they each still have a domain of control. Both parties are still vital to the business. They just have to find a way to get along to be successful.”

Although much of the responsibility for the newly formed IT-telecom relationship lies with the participants, management can do a lot to help or hinder the smoothness of the transition. As a first step, it is imperative to meet with IT and telecommunications staff to evaluate the current state of the internal and external networks. They must be adequate—and adequately se-cure—to support a voice over Internet protocol application.

“For us to do a voice installation without a network assessment, we actually ask customers to sign off on the fact that we will not be responsible for quality at the end of the installation,” Campanaro says. “The network makes or breaks it. What the telecom staff needs to do is speak to the IT department about the user requirements and their expectations for load on the network—all of those kinds of facts that should allow the IT organization to say, ‘Yeah, it’s going to handle this,’ or ‘No, it’s not.’”

Second, management should provide training. “Get [IT staff] certified in these [telephony] systems so that they can implement them as well as possible,” advises John Unger, vice president and general manager at XO Communications, a telecommunications firm in Minneapolis. “Each manufacturer has its own certification, although it’s becoming pretty much standard. If you get certified on one, it enables you to work on another.”