IP Communications and Beyond

I recently had a great conversation with Tom Cross, CEO of the TECHionary web site -- billed as the largest animated library on technology -- and a producer of online tutorials and a teacher for on-site corporate training courses on a variety of IP communications technology topics. Tom called to interview me for a piece on the SIP Forum (of which I am the managing director) that he's planning on publishing to his blog, Cross Talk, and once he got what he needed for his post, we started talking about a number of issues that are close and dear to our hearts.

One thing we shared was our astonishment over the enormous confusion surrounding the proper installation and set-up of high-def flat panel televisions, and the fact that a full 3/4 of the people who buy these sets aren't watching high-def images because they either didn't hook up their sets properly or didn't order the necessary high-def cable or satellite boxes from their service providers -- talk about the need for technology training here!...but I digress, since what I want to focus on here is what I'm calling the Convergence Dilemma.

Tom related to me his experience teaching a recent training course on SIP for a global hospitality company -- and how the only staff in the room were from the company's telecom department. When Tom asked why there were no data guys attending from the IT department, he was told "they do their thing and we do ours" or something to that effect. Apparently, this is a common occurrence during Tom's training gigs, and it apparently signals that even after several years of network convergence and the IP-ing of corporate communications technologies, a wide gulf still exists between the telecom and IT departments of many if not most large, Fortune 1000 corporations.

Today, we might have achieved voice and data convergence from a technology standpoint, but convergence from a human resources perspective is still a figment of our imagination (if that). If this situation is as bad as it seems from Tom's observations, it's certainly clear that it represents a major stumbling block in achieving the promised benefits of IP communications technology, and that such corporations with departmental "iron curtains" that are deploying these solutions risk wreaking havoc instead of reaping cost savings and workforce productivity/efficiency improvements.

I'm curious to see if you share Tom's observations, and if you have anecdotes you can share about companies who haven't yet closed the Telcom/IT Gap. Conversely, I'd love to hear about companies who get "it" -- how they've managed to meld their IT and Telecom teams, and what the outcomes were in terms of deployment successes and overall return on their technology investments.