Managing MACs

Posted by Eric Krapf | Dec 20, 2007

Matt Brunk, who's keeping the lights on over at VOIPLoop for the time being, has an interesting post about how moves, adds and changes can be a window into the bigger challenges of converging voice and data.

Matt raises the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines as an example of how "data" people see the world and deal with it. Noting the process-heavy nature of much of the ITIL vision, Matt writes:

Voice and IT folks are different and whatever you think you can do to unbundle years of “practice, habit or nature,” then you need to study further. Training isn’t going to be handing voice staff a set of books to study and test upon. This may sound flippant and if it is then thank the users of voice services.

Indeed. One of the salient points that's been made about the difference between "voice" and "data" people is that the telecom staff historically has had a much more customer-facing role within the enterprise, whereas the "data" staff dealt with the guts of the network.

What's kind of funny about all this is that it seems like you don't hear so many people talking about "voice" people and "data" people any more. I think part of the reason is there's not much new to say; Matt's post does a good job of explaining the problem, but I think the solution is very much a give and take between the two groups, rather than forcing telecom staff to hit the ITIL books.

But more than that, I think the problem that's outrunning everyone is that there's more to end user customer service now than just IT people or whoever dealing with desk telephones. If you don't already, you're eventually going to be looking at a meaningful segment of your end users communicating primarily via mobiles, social networks and communications-enabled applications.

It's going to make the whole "voice/data" dichotomy look like a game of checkers.