A Tale of Two Cultures

“The voice people get very, very concerned that their jobs are going to go away,” Haigh says. “My view of it is: absolutely not. Their jobs are going to get, in my opinion, more interesting. In a converged world, they’re not going to have to worry about physical equipment problems, because that’s going to be the data network guys’ bailiwick. I think what the voice people get to do is become applications support people. They now get to play more with the capability to build applications and solutions for the user. The functionality isn’t necessarily new—conference, transfer, hold—those sorts of things. It’s being delivered differently.”

Indeed, even in a combined department, there should be clearly divided responsibilities. The two groups are “together” only inasmuch as they must communicate constantly so that all of the applications running on the network work well.

“A very strong network group sometimes has the misconception that voice is just one more application riding their network,” Meierhofer says. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, no problem—it’s just like the order-entry system or e-mail.’ But that’s completely an underestimation. There’s a telecommunications group out there talking with the receptionists and the people in the call centers, and they understand the special way they handle their calls and their customers.” When voice traffic travels on a network, the telecommunications group will still monitor the quality of telephone calls and maintain important call functions.

Bilderback says that the telecom experts’ ongoing duties will include handling changes due to staff turnover and requests for new features and functions. They will provide continued day-to-day user support and will find ways to make the organization’s communication more efficient. Data specialists will be busy rolling out additional infrastructure to keep up with advances in technology and the company’s growing needs. The IT group also must learn how VOIP hardware, software, and users interact.

Will the two groups ever truly become one? Will, say, telecom people decide to learn the IT technology that underlies voice functionality? “A lot of it has to do with the person’s desire and where they see their career path going,” Kalina says. “It opens up a lot more opportunities for them. At [one client site], there was a guy who was strictly telecom for 15 years and was getting bored. Once we did the voice over IP, he got involved with supporting the applications that ran on it, and then he started getting involved with the data folks. From there, he moved on to doing some other software stuff. It helped him discover hidden talents that he never had the opportunity to use.”

And in the future, as VOIP becomes the across-the-board standard, more and more up-and-comers will be cross-trained in IT and voice. Or, at least, they’d better be in order to meet the inevitable demand.

“As VOIP gets moved down to the mid-sized and small businesses, those companies’ challenge is going to be developing a staff that has this independent area of expertise,” Haigh says. “There aren’t many of those people around today. Those people are just learning.”