Four Reasons Why VoIP is a Good Call - ' Lesson Four'

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: Consider a unified communications platform.">
Lesson Four: It's hard to be smart about what all this is costing if you don't have coordinated monitoring and management. Traditionally, we had separated telephony (the PSTN wire line usage) from procurement (the cell phone usage) and IT (the data circuits). One conclusion of the VoIP strategy was that we need a "unified communications manager" to pull all this together and start looking for ways to save money by pooling capacity, and changing capabilities and habits.

In our case, the CIO ended up with this job—inheriting the telephony team even as we changed over to VoIP and putting them through some accelerated retraining. Handling the cell phone issues was harder and remained unresolved.

I think that more and more CIOs are going to end up owning this problem. The good news is that there is a lot of information available on which to base decisions. Analyzing it all is work, but not rocket science. And what you find can help save lot of money—albeit at the expense of service provider margins. The bad news is that this is another continuing problem for the CIO's team to work on.

Maybe unified communications platforms will help out here, but whether they do or not, it's time to heed the call.

Story Guide:

Four Reasons Why VoIP is a Good Call

Lesson One: Person-to-person calling attempts waste a lot of time.

Lesson Two: Scheduled audio conference calls are growing.

Lesson Three: Calls are not always the primary focus of attention.

Lesson Four: Consider a unified communications platform.

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