Convergence Issues

The new world of converged voice, data and video offers users many advantages. It also offers many issues that may not be easy to rectify. A few months ago Larry Hettick and Steve Taylor brought up one such issue in their Network World Newsletter.

Consider this scenario. You organization uses a unified communications portal that gives you access to voice mail, email and faxes from your desktop. Although it generally works well, this morning you try to open a voice mail message and the voice is garbled. Where might the problem lie?

The reality is it could be in any number of places. Your reaction, however, is to call the help desk. Herein lies the crux of the matter. Who is manning the help desk? Do you have voice people, or data people answering the phones? These simple questions become even more complicated in the data world because you have network specialist, and application specialists.

In this scenario, the problem might be with the unified communications portal, or the audio application that encoded the message, or the transmission equipment, or the PBX, or the server or server operating system, or any number of other places.

How does the customer service rep deal with this? One of the big issues is that the reps in IT generally specialize in either networks or applications, but not both. Based on their experience, Larry and Steve said in their article, "the gulf between the applications world and the network world is even wider than the gulf between voice network experts and data network experts."

This is something you might want to think about when you consider implementing converged solutions. If any of you have any ideas or suggestions please send them to me and I will share them.