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As IP-PBX station shipments grow and pilot projects prove in over the coming years, enterprises will begin looking toward larger-scale deployments. And at that point, much of the focus will shift from solving implementation challenges to optimizing ongoing management.
Most vendor representatives and consultants interviewed for this article agreed that, at this early stage, network management organizations, processes and tools have not truly been put to the test of keeping converged networks up and performing day in, day out on an enterprise-wide basis. As a result, converged-network management remains a work in progress, a discipline that's still being defined.
People Issues
That discipline will start not with tools or technologies, but with people-the inevitable question of how to organize voice people and data people into a convergence staff. Though the voice staff may have long ago been placed under the IT group in the organizational charts, there seems to have been little cross-pollination in terms of expertise-and yes, that could be a problem.
Mike Weller, managing principal of PlanNet Consulting, said most employees who are cross-trained probably have attained this expertise on their own initiative. "I don't think organizations have come up with a systematic way for upgrading their people," he said. "I'm sure some of the leading organizations have done it, but we're not seeing any groundswell develop. It's still the silos."
Adds his colleague, David Stein, "I would have thought we'd be much further along, organizationally, than we are now. But it's definitely turf, fiefdom-type of scenarios that we see playing out again and again." The exceptions he sees are in enterprises where constrained resources force staff to become more versatile across the board-say, in areas such as higher education.
What are the implications of this continuing division of expertise? It's not simply a lack of technical knowledge; it's that personnel haven't acquired some of the unique skills they'll need to manage voice as part of a converged network. "Voice people have typically had more interaction with end users, and have some skills for understanding needs and requirements," explained Mike Weller. "The reality has been that most data people, at least on the network side, have not had to interact with end users."
The challenge, according to Weller, will be, "How do you...