Voice over IP A Discussion of Business and IT Challenges

The Governance Challenge

Telephone systems have traditionally been managed by a separate telecom teams in companies than their network teams. Unfortunately, the telecom and data teams are known to not always cooperate on joint projects. The telecom people have been managing telephone systems for years and are extremely good at it. They know what it takes to communicate and negotiate with vendors like Verizon, ATT, Sprint, and others. They also know the ins and outs of what clients are expecting from their telephones. And above all they know how to live up to those expectations very well. On the other hand, network teams are known to be busy putting out fires. Network teams are usually very analytical and study the in-depth cause of failures in order to prevent them from happening again. They are always under pressure for on-time delivery of new projects in addition to keeping thousands of applications up-to-date. Scheduled and sometimes unscheduled unavailability of network resources is generally more accepted within data services than voice services. As companies deploy IP telephony on their data network, a natural shift of responsibility and power is bound to happen. VoIP becomes a mission critical application running on a data network. Network teams that are usually busy in maintaining many other applications also become responsible for maintaining IP based telephone systems. While it is easy for a network team to understand how fragile this VoIP application is because it is dependant on their network availability, the end-users continue to expect same robust and reliable voice experience they received from traditional PBXs. Anything less than what they have been used to is considered unacceptable. On the other hand, treating voice as just another data application running on the network can be devastating to IT department’s reputation. Voice should be treated as voice because, unlike most data applications, voice requires very low latency (travel time) and absolutely no packet losses (loss of data packets due to congestions). As IP Telephony introduced in a company, a natural shift in responsibilities is bound to happen. Telecom may feel threatened by data teams as they share control over a major responsibility.