Convergence: The end of communications managers?

• Tags:
• Packages,
• Unified,
• Telecoms,
• Centric

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 25 Jul 2007 08:19 BST

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

...this role is as integrated into the IT department as it should be. While telecoms, network and IT budgets tend, in larger companies at least, to be under the remit of the chief information officer, most still have separate communications groups designing and planning network infrastructure, rather than operating within an integrated enterprise-architecture team.

The objective of such enterprise-architecture teams is to design, implement and manage an overarching framework that embraces fixed and mobile voice and data, collaboration applications, such as email and videoconferencing, and enterprise packages, such as ERP and CRM.

"It's early days and not many have a clear strategy on all this yet, although they know they've got to do it," says Powell. "In the long term, we expect to see integrated teams doing architecture, design and operations for both IT and networks, but it will take some years for this transition to be complete."

In the meantime, however, he believes that there is a great need for both sides to understand more about each other's technologies and that "the convergence of the CMA and BCS will help".

But this does not imply that the communications manager role will disappear over the next five years either. "There'll continue to be a need for communications-centric processes in every organisation and there'll be managers specific to that. But they won't be operating separately — they'll come within a broader IT remit. So it won't be about separate roles — it'll be about differing skills," Powell explains.

In some instances, he adds, this situation will — and already is — leading to the re-hiring of in-house communications professionals, many of whom were let go when organisations outsourced their telecoms function believing it to be a commodity or introduced managed services to look after their data networks. "But they are now starting to realise that this was a mistake because it means that no-one understands the design and future planning issues," Powell says.

Hekkink agrees that the need for communications skills is on the rise. But, in his opinion, to truly deliver the benefits of unified communications, it will become progressively more important for network managers to work closely with their application manager colleagues.

"For unified applications to deliver business value, network managers have to understand the business and its requirements much better, which is where applications managers generally have the advantage, as they have to understand business work flow," Hekkink says.

Conversely, however, while applications managers may have, in the past, viewed network bandwidth simply as a bits pipe to run their packages, they too will have to change their attitude and work with network colleagues in a more co-ordinated fashion.

"When all applications, including communications, are running off the network, things like security, quality of service, availability and resilience become mission-critical to the organisation in the same way that, in the past, the PBX was critical," Hekkink points out.

Moreover, because network infrastructure is becoming less of a transport layer and more intelligent in and of itself, particularly as a result of the growing move to service-oriented network architectures, the communications and applications functions "will need to be centralised and co-ordinated very closely" as they become progressively intertwined.

But this transition will not be without its challenges, primarily in terms of organisational politics, but also in terms of language, terminology and associations, which can be very different in the two worlds.

"This is a realignment change, so it won't necessarily mean a massive reduction in head count, although it might mean some. For the last 10 to 15 years, the BCS has been talking about hybrid managers that have both a technical and business understanding, but now we're adding both IT and communications knowledge into the mix," Bamforth explains.

While in some instances this situation can be fixed by training, in other cases, it will involve "unlearning" what has already been learned and of thinking about matters in new ways.

"IT and communications are two very different cultures, so this could be a tricky transition for some but, for others, it could be an opportunity to learn and build new converged skills sets. Like everything, that will vary from organisation to organisation and from individual to individual but, nonetheless, convergence is happening and it has to be addressed," Bamforth concludes.

• 
• 
• 
• 

• Share this article:
• Digg
• Slashdot
• Del.ici.ous
• Stumble
• Reddit