Changing roles for IT and communications professionals may be on the way following the recent merger of the CMA and the BCS

The winding path towards IT and network convergence took a new twist last month when the Communications Management Association agreed to become part of the British Computer Society.

At its annual general meeting on 11 July, 2007, a huge 87 percent of the Communications Management Association's (CMA) 1,200 mostly telecoms-focused members agreed that the organisation should henceforth operate as a subsidiary of the 60,000-strong IT-centric British Computer Society (BCS). However, the CMA will still keep its chartered status and existing charity number and continue to operate autonomously, albeit within the strictures of a BCS-set budget.

Glenn Powell, the CMA's chief executive, explains the rationale behind the move: "This signifies recognition of the way that the industry and technology is changing — in other words, the steady march of convergence. So both organisations recognise that the ICT professional requires detailed knowledge of both IT and communications in order to meet the challenges of the future."

The move means that the two bodies will be able to provide a "better-focused and better-resourced response to government and regulatory initiatives" and an enhanced service to each other's respective members. For example, BCS members will be able to join a communications forum if they so desire, which will automatically enrol them as affiliate members of the CMA, while existing CMA members will also become affiliate BCS members.

"We'll have a wider IT community that we can reach into and interface with and that's very important in an increasingly converged world. It's not there yet, but it's on its way and so we're getting ahead of all this," says Powell.

From the CMA's point of view, it needed to respond to the fact that the traditional role of its members "is changing dramatically and rapidly". The BCS, meanwhile, had to "respond more effectively to the impact of convergence on behalf of their traditional members".

And this is important, says Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca, because: "Organisational shifts like this tend not to lead the way. Instead they tend to reflect undercurrents, which indicates that convergence is starting to become an increasing reality."

Three steps to convergence
So what is happening out there in the market and how far down the road to convergence is the average UK company in practice?

According to Simon Farr, head of marketing for convergence infrastructure and unified communications and collaboration at BT Global Services, there are three main phases involved in the convergence process.

The first is consolidation, which involves organisations reducing numbers of suppliers, streamlining purchasing procedures and defining a strategy to deal with their existing, often fragmented, network infrastructure.

The second stage relates to convergence and is about introducing a single IP voice and data network to replace multiple alternative offerings. Farr says that three-quarters of BT Global Services' customer base expect to be undertaking or to have completed this step by the end of 2008.

The third phase, however, is about exploiting this IP infrastructure further. While some customers are happy to simply use the network for data communications only, many choose to introduce IP voice trunking or IP telephony as a first application before looking at other options.

These options range from personal productivity applications, such as unified communications and collaboration, to videoconferencing, virtual call centres and hosted storage, but uptake of such technologies is limited and fragmented in most organisations to date.

Nonetheless, Jurgen Hekkink, solutions marketing manager for unified communications at network consultancy Affiniti, indicates that the entrance of Microsoft into the unified-communications space has hastened the move to converged networks over the last six months or so.

While in the past the main drivers behind adoption were factors such as office relocations, the creation of a greenfield site or the decision to move a traditional TDM PBX into maintenance, customers are now starting to see the benefits of unified-communications applications to facilitate remote and home working.

"Businesses are currently being driven by the increasing need to mobilise their workforce to enable them to undertake more flexible working and improve work-life balance," Powell explains. "Much of this is being driven by youth wanting to work in different ways and by more women entering the workforce, demanding different work patterns. This quiet mobility revolution is not only leading the need for communications technologies, but also being driven by it."

Other progressively important factors are the desire of organisations to cut the amount of expensive office space they require and to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing energy usage.

How convergence affects communication managers
As to how all of this affects communications managers' roles, Powell indicates that, while the telecoms function has increasingly been coming under the remit of the IT department since the 1980s, real organisational change has, to date, been limited.

The telecoms manager of 10 years ago who had sole responsibility for voice may now be virtually extinct as the role has merged with that of a data-network manager, resulting in such common job titles as "infrastructure manager" or "operations manager". But that does not mean to say that...

...this role is as integrated into the IT department as it should be. While telecoms, network and IT budgets tend, in larger companies at least, to be under the remit of the chief information officer, most still have separate communications groups designing and planning network infrastructure, rather than operating within an integrated enterprise-architecture team.

The objective of such enterprise-architecture teams is to design, implement and manage an overarching framework that embraces fixed and mobile voice and data, collaboration applications, such as email and videoconferencing, and enterprise packages, such as ERP and CRM.

"It's early days and not many have a clear strategy on all this yet, although they know they've got to do it," says Powell. "In the long term, we expect to see integrated teams doing architecture, design and operations for both IT and networks, but it will take some years for this transition to be complete."

In the meantime, however, he believes that there is a great need for both sides to understand more about each other's technologies and that "the convergence of the CMA and BCS will help".

But this does not imply that the communications manager role will disappear over the next five years either. "There'll continue to be a need for communications-centric processes in every organisation and there'll be managers specific to that. But they won't be operating separately — they'll come within a broader IT remit. So it won't be about separate roles — it'll be about differing skills," Powell explains.

In some instances, he adds, this situation will — and already is — leading to the re-hiring of in-house communications professionals, many of whom were let go when organisations outsourced their telecoms function believing it to be a commodity or introduced managed services to look after their data networks. "But they are now starting to realise that this was a mistake because it means that no-one understands the design and future planning issues," Powell says.

Hekkink agrees that the need for communications skills is on the rise. But, in his opinion, to truly deliver the benefits of unified communications, it will become progressively more important for network managers to work closely with their application manager colleagues.

"For unified applications to deliver business value, network managers have to understand the business and its requirements much better, which is where applications managers generally have the advantage, as they have to understand business work flow," Hekkink says.

Conversely, however, while applications managers may have, in the past, viewed network bandwidth simply as a bits pipe to run their packages, they too will have to change their attitude and work with network colleagues in a more co-ordinated fashion.

"When all applications, including communications, are running off the network, things like security, quality of service, availability and resilience become mission-critical to the organisation in the same way that, in the past, the PBX was critical," Hekkink points out.

Moreover, because network infrastructure is becoming less of a transport layer and more intelligent in and of itself, particularly as a result of the growing move to service-oriented network architectures, the communications and applications functions "will need to be centralised and co-ordinated very closely" as they become progressively intertwined.

But this transition will not be without its challenges, primarily in terms of organisational politics, but also in terms of language, terminology and associations, which can be very different in the two worlds.

"This is a realignment change, so it won't necessarily mean a massive reduction in head count, although it might mean some. For the last 10 to 15 years, the BCS has been talking about hybrid managers that have both a technical and business understanding, but now we're adding both IT and communications knowledge into the mix," Bamforth explains.

While in some instances this situation can be fixed by training, in other cases, it will involve "unlearning" what has already been learned and of thinking about matters in new ways.

"IT and communications are two very different cultures, so this could be a tricky transition for some but, for others, it could be an opportunity to learn and build new converged skills sets. Like everything, that will vary from organisation to organisation and from individual to individual but, nonetheless, convergence is happening and it has to be addressed," Bamforth concludes.

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