Tom Brannen, one of our regular columnists from the Society of Communications Technology Consultants (SCTC), seems to have struck a nerve with his post entitled, "We Don't Care. We Don't Have To. We're the Phone Company." In this post, Tom lays out a series of issues that enterprises are experiencing as they attempt to deal with telcos for public network services, in a world where such services no longer come with a lot of, well, service. The specific issues he calls out:
1. The service role has completely transitioned to a sales role.
2. Bureaucracy is killing customer service.
3. Account teams are less empowered than ever to service the customer.
This is not just a litany of complaints for the sake of complaining. This is a recipe for enterprise communications managers to be left holding the bag, running the risk of alienating end users by providing poor service, and financial managers by paying more for that bad service than they should.
The key word in that previous paragraph is "Risk," and it's a word that Dave Michels highlights in another recent post, "Moving to the Cloud Means Offloading Risk." Dave focuses on another sort of risk that enterprise managers face: The risk that comes from the technological complexity of modern software and IP-based communications systems. Dave suggests that moving to hosted communications services is one way of, as he says, offloading that risk to a service provider that's in the business of building and running such systems.
So you have 2 trends--the decline of the modern telco as a dependable partner for enterprise communications shops; and the (purported) rise of the hosted service provider as an attractive option for providing next-gen communications services in a way that relieves the enterprise of many of the burdens that those new systems impose.
It might be tempting to see Dave Michels' argument as a way out of the dilemma that Tom Brannen describes: Just outsource your communications to a service provider--preferably not a telco, hopefully an SI or other trusted partner--and many of today's issues go away: They're either handled by the provider without your intervention, or the next-gen nature of the service itself renders many of the legacy telco issues moot.
However, the risk here isn't that systems are complex; the risk is who you trust with that complexity. A lot of enterprise folks would say: I trust me and my staff; I'd like to be able to trust a provider, but in the end, I'm accountable no matter who's actually running the systems. A strong SLA is nice, but all it really means to me is that, when the provider screws up, there'll be some extra money in credits for my successor to put into the budget once I've been fired.
The point in Dave Michels' piece that could change this equation is his very valid point about budgets being cut, and the related issue of ongoing IT skills shortages. You may trust your staff as individuals, but if there aren't enough of them to go around, you may not be able to trust them, as an organization, to have the horsepower to meet all the challenges. That's one argument for the cloud that I do think is worth watching.
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