The View from Here: Is VoIP the Answer? Well, What are the Questions?

June 24, 2008

The VoIP decision making process is perhaps the most important an organization will make. It involves the very lifeblood of a company: The means by which it communicates with partners, customers, prospects – and each other.

The key is to understand both what the company needs and the ramifications of moving to an IP-based system. For some companies, the need is a no-brainer: For instance, VoIP is undeniably an asset to a highly mobile organizations in which getting the right information quickly to the right person can spell the difference between success and failure. Companies also must look at competitors: In some cases, organizations lose ground by standing pat.

In other cases, companies simply wouldn’t realize enough benefits from a transition to VoIP to make it worthwhile. Perhaps an academic publisher can do without VoIP. The emphasis today is on features and applications, not cost. At the beginning of the VoIP era, the differences in pricing between standard and VoIP services was a big deal. This is less a factor today because traditional phone companies have cut their prices to the bone in order to stay competitive.

There also is an added element of risk. Having discreet voice and data networks is expensive and can be seen as wasteful now that quality is good enough and it is feasible to squeeze everything onto one network. But there is a significant advantage: A dual network lets the company keep communicating with the outside world even if one network fails. In a consolidated network, a company risks losing all communications if a problem arises. The investment that a prudent company makes in network redundancy obviates some of the savings from the initial collapsing of the two networks into one.

The bottom line is that IT departments and people who must ultimately approve or pass on a switch to IP must truly understand each other. Some key questions:

Is it needed? Is it needed for some departments, but not others?
What are our competitors doing?
What benefits will the organization realize from the switch?
What are the risks?
What is the cost to do it? To do it right?
Are our operations people trained on this technology? Must we hire? Retrain?
Will there be retraining of employees?
Will we eventually be able to cut staff?
How will this help our disaster recovery/business continuity efforts?
Are their regulatory, legal and/or compliance issues?

There clearly are other questions. If they all are not answered to the satisfaction of IT and the financially-oriented departments, the organization simply isn’t ready to make its move.

–Carl Weinschenk

Image courtesy of Everaldo.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Uncategorized