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The next question is what to buy and how to install and migrate to it. These are great questions but would require a whole separate article to discuss, and what I would like to focus on here is a question I bumped into while working on a large UC deployment recently: how will UC affect my day-to-day operations?
Those of us who have been doing this for a while know that when entering a project like UC, it is all about standing up the technology and getting the users onto the new platform. In the back of our minds, we know that someone will need to look after it in production but those thoughts are secondary to the fun of opening the box, putting the pieces together, and seeing how it works. My role on this project was to look at how support of the UC platform would be transitioned from the development team to "business as usual" operations. Naturally, a dedicated deployment team had been
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Voice services are the ultimate real time application. There is no "I'll slow this down" or "I'll send it later." |
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UC is the voice services. Email and IM, even video, are in the comfort zone of IT departments. They have been managing these services for years and are generally good at it. Voice is a different story - especially if VoIP is not broadly deployed in your organization. Voice services are the ultimate real time application. There is no "I'll slow this down" or "I'll send it later." Voice packets cannot be reassembled later without introducing very noticeable delays that just won't do. People expect instant service, five 9s reliability, and high quality. Meeting the expectations associated with voice
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established, and at the time of my arrival this team was supporting a 200-person pilot. The migration plan had UC being deployed to 40,000+ internal users over 3 years (or better) starting now! A representative from the Help Desk had been embedded in the team. His job was to understand the technology, develop troubleshooting skills, and seed that knowledge back into the broader Help Desk team. An excellent start, but not nearly enough to support a rollout of this size. It was clear that the development team was not in a position to support the platform as the migration quickly gained momentum. Sure they could support the 200 pilot users, maybe even the first 2,000, but after that they would be swamped. UC needed to be "Operationalized."
Before getting into what that entails, I'd like to share some observations from the early days of this project. My background is Telco Operations plus IT. It was clear to me, and to the development team, that the hard part of
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communications is a new experience for many IT departments. Are they ready? I suspect not. It also struck me that what I was seeing was a merging of telco operations and IT operations, for real. Now this may not be a revelation to you and I know the TMForum and ITIL standards are converging, but the deployment of UC brought it home to me in a very real sense. IT had become the phone company!
Anyway, back to Operationalization…..
For me Operationalization is the task of moving an application from development into "business-as-usual" mode. This requires an impact analysis to be performed on the processes, systems, and support organizations involved. It's best to do this using a standard, structured industry framework. The obvious choice was ITIL, but given that UC is all about communications services, I decided to use eTOM. Now eTOM is a fine model but you could spend a lifetime and a small fortune
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