A Tale of Two Cultures

Third, delegate responsibility. Haigh says the CIO, or whoever’s responsible for creating organizational structure, should take a good look at what’s about to happen and rebuild the support organization accordingly. Where do the responsibilities and accountabilities lie? By clearly delineating responsibilities, companies can ease the tension between IT and telecommunications employees as the departments merge together.

And fourth, communicate as much as you know about your organization’s infrastructure, as well as its wants and needs, to the VOIP provider. “I can build a solution around almost anything,” says Brad Howe, account manager at Onvoy. “But you have to tell me what currently is there. If you’ve got 10 fax lines at your headquarters building but you only have five faxes in the building, what are the other five for? If you don’t know, I don’t know if I have to include them or not. Good information from the customer’s perspective leads me to be able to build more solid solutions that are easy to implement.”

Most important of all is a wholehearted buy-in at the executive level. “It really takes executive-level participation, because when you do have problems, you need someone in management to help sort through that,” Bilderback says. “Because the issues do start to cross political boundaries within that organization.”

Executives who appreciate and show enthusiasm for the project can help apprehensive staffers understand that there are far more pros than cons to the implementation. “They can help everyone understand what the benefits are, not only from a cost perspective, but also what type of a foundation it lays for the company as far as future growth,” says Steve Kalina, senior consultant at Ambient Consulting, LLC, an IT development and management consulting firm in Minneapolis. “They can show them that this is something different and exciting, but it’s also an opportunity for each of them to learn new skills, cross-train amongst themselves, and start sharing the knowledge.”

New Roles

Often, employee apprehension stems from an expectation that when two departments merge, some people will lose their jobs. Sometimes that’s the case, and sometimes it’s not.

“VOIP has shrunk staffs, no question about it,” Unger says. “Take a building with 1,500 employees in it. Say on average they move every telephone in that building twice a year. It takes a nine-employee staff to do that with old legacy telephone gear. But when a person moves with an IP telephone, he literally unplugs his telephone from this desk, puts it in the box with his computer, moves it to his new office, and plugs it back in. It homes itself back to the same master terminal. There are nine people who have just lost their jobs.”

But Keith Meierhofer, founding partner of N’compass, a Minneapolis-based technology consulting and management firm, says that’s not always the case. “There are some efficiencies, potentially, where maybe I used to have one person at every site of an enterprise working on telecom. I might be able to streamline that and centralize some of it. But generally they [staff] still have some of the same requirements out at those sites,” Meierhofer says.