As an independent technology consultant, I have been advising clients and giving vendor-neutral options on technology for the past 28 years. In this article I wish to share with you our past experiences of why enterprises need to know the importance of proper planning and preparation when making any technology change.

In the early days of my career it was all about providing an apples-to-apples comparison of PBXs (how each box compared to the other box; how many different feature sets one had over the other; the pros and cons of each, the limitations, strengths and weaknesses, etc.).

Sometimes, no matter how prepared you might be for an IT project, you find yourself facing challenges you never could have imagined. Take, for example, the situation we encountered recently working on a project for one of our retail clients.

Well it's 2015, and what is the future trend for deskphones in the enterprise? I have polled consultants in the U.S. and Europe to see what the reality is on this topic.

From the US Perspective:
It is my opinion that deskphones in the enterprise are dwindling in their usefulness. I say this because I have had two deployments now where they went with no deskphones -- just headsets and using the client application on the laptop/PC. (See "What ... No Deskphones?").

Are your customers frustrated by the time they reach a live agent? Are they complaining about your self-service options? When was the last time you asked?

In today's fast-paced, multitasking, and busy world, customers want to get in and get out of your call center. They don't want to spend any of their precious moments listening to a recording saying, "Your call is important to us, please remain on the line and we will be with you momentarily." Think about yourself as customer. You know you don't like this sort of messaging yourself, so why make your customers listen to it?

As I write this article I am attending the Society of Communications Technology Consultants Annual conference in Atlanta. Our keynote speaker was social media expert Crystal Washington. She gave us great information and tips on using LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Google Alerts. It got me thinking how well do we all do with social networks, and do we really know how to use them to our advantage?

If we are going to spend time on social media it needs to be very strategic. We need to be able to measure, to see results, and it needs to be practical. This allows all of us to get better use out of it with our existing clients and provides better visibility into the people who are searching for information about our company or services.

Last we checked in on the state of the deskphone in the enterprise, a growing number of organizations were making the shift away from the traditional deskphone toward softphones and mobile devices. In 2017, I am seeing deskphones are still around in droves, with many large enterprises continuing to deploy thousands of deskphones each year.

When I was speaking at Enterprise Connect last year, I asked the audience of about 150 people how many companies had deployed new systems with no deskphones at all -- not one hand went up. However, when I asked who had deployed a mix of deskphones with softphones and/or mobile, about 25 hands went up.

With over 25 years' experience in implementing and managing carrier and client telecom projects at The BAZ Group, we have certainly seen it all. And while each project carries its own unique challenges, if there is one thing we have learned, when it comes to carrier cutovers, if anything can go wrong, it most definitely will. They say that experience is the best teacher, and nowhere is that more true than in Wi-Fi installs and upgrades.

Prepare and Plan

The answer to the first question, apparently, is most of the time.

Total is a very ambitious target. It is very difficult to capture all costs when projecting or comparing -- whether it is for actual proposals in hand or for a general business case. Each unknown variable will impact the accuracy, and at some point the analysis must focus on the cost categories that "move the needle." But labeling a selective life-cycle cost analysis as a "Total Cost of Ownership" is misleading.

When I joined the ranks of independent consultants 30 years ago, most consultants provided value by understanding a broad range of telecommunications services, options, and vendors. Much of the value offered to clients was the knowledge of how to get things done with the myriad of vendors -- not to mention the confusing bureaucracy of the big vendors (some things never change!). The most common telecom consultants were those who understood both telephone systems and telephone carrier services, including networking. A veritable one-man band.

When wide area data networks, became a common part of the clients' telecommunications landscape, it also became a knowledge demanded of the consultant. In fact, the gentleman that brought me into the consulting business hired me because I also understood data communications. As an old "telephone company guy," he did not have this background and knew that our clients needed the breadth of knowledge that spanned both voice and data services.

Implementation planning for communications technology solutions has evolved over recent years, although vendor methodologies lack consistency. Still, what used to pass for acceptable procedure or even best practice is no longer the right way to optimize the opportunity for successful installation.

A legacy PBX vendor often still uses the same approach that worked for years with telephony cutovers. Most every industry veteran can recall the long weekends of a large flash cut to a completely new PBX, replete with copious amounts of coffee, cross-connects, and cold pizza. Many a telephony tech made more money in overtime on cutovers than regular pay, albeit at a cost to family time.

On the surface, it appears we are communicating more than ever. We are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of emails, tweets, announcements, newsletters, webinars, blogs, etc. It often amounts to so much noise that we don't hear the important stuff, or we shut down the inflow just to obtain some level of productivity.

How each of us filters through the cacophony to get what we need becomes a business survival skill. By necessity, we eventually learn to invest our precious time on those sources that have the most to offer. It reminds me of the wonderful catch-phrase used by Business Communications Review (which spawned No Jitter when it ceased publishing): "The best signal-to-noise ratio in the industry."

Last month at the annual SCTC conference, I gave a speech on developments with Layer 1 (from the OSI model) technology. Although there are many intriguing technical functions that reside in Layer 1, most people think of copper and fiber cabling. Well, that's fine by me, because cabling is the subject I'd like to discuss today.

During my speech, I challenged the consultants in attendance to consider the baseline recommendation for copper cabling to the desktop. Without giving it much thought, most customers are led to believe that Category 6a cabling is the obvious preference -- it is the default choice of the cabling industry.

Over the many years of assisting clients implement a wide variety of technology solutions, we have repeatedly verified a common understanding: A good project team is critical. Less-than-satisfactory projects have almost always turned south on the substandard performance of a key individual or two.

The single most important player on the vendor's team is usually the lead project manager (PM). A good PM will make the client feel like everyone on the team is focused only on its satisfaction. Most vendors say client satisfaction is their chief goal, but not every vendor delivers on that promise.

There is an old saying in sales: "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." But what happens if the buyer does not understand how to make the sizzle? After all, even a few drops of grease can create a sizzle.

In the contact center sales game, it appears that some are buying the trendy sizzle of the day. It used to be multi-channel, then omnichannel, and now, as analyst Sheila McGee-Smith points out in her recent slideshow on the top contact center stories of the year, the sizzle phrase is "Digital Transformation." But selling the digital transformation sizzle can be tricky since many buyers don't understand what digital transformation is or how to accomplish it.

Typical for a controversial topic, many people have fairly strong opinions about the effect of the recent FCC vote to repeal the government's 2015 Net neutrality rules (see, for example, today's No Jitter post by communications technology attorney Martha Buyer).

After more than one attempt to create formal Net neutrality rules (and losing court battles in 2010), in 2015 the FCC reclassified broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Now, broadband providers won't be considered common carriers, and although the FCC established "transparency" requirements, it essentially transferred oversight to the FTC. As Buyer wrote in another recent No Jitter article on Net neutrality, this may not be adequate.

Have we already lost the individual privacy battle? The combination of the enormous amount of information that is gathered on an individual (big data) and the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics means that almost any organization knows far more about us than we likely realize.

Let's just look at how information is gathered today: