New responsibilities

Communications News, Nov, 2004 by Ken Anderberg

Twenty years ago, magazine editors had little to do with the actual laying out of the publication's pages. We assigned articles, edited, wrote headlines and perhaps offered a crude design idea for each article's presentation (among a myriad of other tasks). Someone else, often at a printing company halfway across the country, did the actual layout production. Computers-and programs like Pagemaker and QuarkXpress--changed that dynamic. Editors learned how to design their own pages--a new skill previously handled by someone else inside their organization or by a business partner. That new skill required training and a shift in how editors approached their jobs.

The same type of shift is now occurring in enterprise telephony and IT departments, as the converging of voice, data and video is changing the size and makeup of these staffs. In many organizations, one staff is growing while the other one shrinks. One staff is receiving more training and being allocated more budget than previously.

If you recognize these changes, then your organization is part of a growing trend. It is in the process of having one staff for both its data and voice infrastructures, and the most likely staff left standing will be IT.

Convergence is taking hold, and the impact on your telephony and IT staffs will be profound-and potentially disruptive or disorienting.

As discussed in one of the articles in this month's Trends section ("Voice Systems: IT in charge"), telephony staffs are increasingly being put under the control of IT managers. Companies are reducing their telephony operations staff, or even eliminating telephony departments entirely.

The immediate effects will be unsettling for many employees but the long-term impact on enterprise data and voice networks will be to streamline telephony/IT operations and reduce associated costs-assuming, of course, that the transition to converged networks takes a logical and carefully orchestrated path.

IP telephony's maturation is behind the staff responsibility evolution. An organization's implementation of a voice-over-IP network begins, in effect, a natural progression to management by the IT department. Voice has now become data, the IT group's specialty.

Voice, however, has many unique needs and attributes that may be unfamiliar to IT people. Without the proper training in this new technology, the IT department will be set up to fail its voice network responsibilities.

This month's cover story illustrates many of the challenges faced by today's telephony managers-and tomorrow's IT managers. Voice is a new arena for IT staff members, much like designing magazine pages on a computer was new for editors 20 years ago.

Just as those editor's experienced errors and frustration in learning computer and magazine design skills simultaneously, today's IT staff will encounter some difficulties as they transition to overseeing the very different world of voice communications.

Ken Anderburg

kanderberg@comnews.com