Section 8.2. Business Environment
8.2. Business EnvironmentSome business structures and philosophies are more compatible with VoIP ideology than others. When considering VoIP adoption, figure out where your business fits in the market adoption cycle for new technologies. If you're a persistent early adopter who loves skating along the leading edge, then VoIP is a no-brainer. If you're a very mitigation-minded, deliberate organization that is historically slow to invest, then your adoption of VoIP systems may take some time. Chances are, if you're reading this book, you don't fall into that latter category. 8.2.1. The Market Adoption CycleThe early minority of organizations are those on the bleeding edge of technology: they always have their noses to the wind, are constantly seeking, and taking risks on, newer technologies (see Figure 8-1). The early majority of organizations are those that mitigate the risk of a business investment with a more conservative wait-and-see attitude. The late majority of adopters wait until the price of the technology has been brought down by the early crowd , and then they adopt. As far as VoIP goes, it will be a few years yet before the late majority begins to adopt the technology. The late minority of organizations tend to be very small, often one-person, shops that have no choice but to wait until a technology is so accepted, so standardized, that it can be implemented with a minimal investment and almost no risk. Is your organization historically a late majority or early minority adopter? Does your company's attitude toward technology match your desire as an administrator or system builder to embrace VoIP? Figure 8-1. Early adopters of a newer enterprise technology like VoIP may enjoy the most benefit, but also take the biggest risk 8.2.2. EfficiencyWhen considering an investment in VoIP, you've got to justify the expenditure of implementing all that shiny new hardware and software against VoIP's benefits to the organization. Increased network efficiency is a possible benefit. Is your organization's network an efficient one? Would VoIP have any impact on existing levels of service to which your users are accustomed? Would voice traffic added to once data-only network pathways hurt other applications' performance? 8.2.3. ProductivityAnother oft-cited appeal factor for next -generation telephony is productivity gains. Will VoIP enhance productivity? Will new telephony applications allow you to:
8.2.4. CostThe cost model of VoIP is substantially different than that of traditional telephony. The old cost model is economically fixed, meaning that network links and devices tend to have an unchanging cost and an unchanging value to the organization. VoIP obsoletes this model because it allows software to control telephony features and the voice network economy. Since software can evolve and improve over time, the cost to maintain your phone system is likely to decrease over time. In a converged network, voice and data are carried by the same physical and data link layer components . This means that only one set of network support expertise is required, so the cost of staffing the network is said to be lower. Compare that to a traditional voice network, which has telecom staff, not IT staff, doing the maintaining and troubleshooting. This fact, too, can lower operating costs. But the up-front capital (and training investment) required to replace a traditional voice network with VoIP is sometimes viewed as prohibitive. Indeed, some organizations may think the up-front cost of a total VoIP conversion may be too much to bear. In most situations, the biggest part of the up-front investment isn't hardware, but consulting. System design, training, and technical support can account for the lion's share of the budgetespecially when the implementation is complex or your company lacks in-house expertise. There are some ways to reduce that big up-front cost:
8.2.4.1 Cost models help sell IP telephonyA per-user cost model allocates the costs of an asset based on an even division among all its users. A $50 asset with 50 users is allocated at a cost of $1 per user. Allocating an even share of the cost of the initial investment to each user of the system allows you do several things:
You can apply the same method to the ongoing costs of the implementation: service and support, telephone company bills, internal training, and so on. 8.2.4.2 Actual consumption cost modelIt's possible, in large VoIP plans, to miscalculate cost distribution because an even, per-user division isn't accurate enough. That is, the Marketing Department may have twice the number of phone users as the Support Department, but Support makes twice as many phone calls. Allocating per user in this instance would not be an accurate way to allocate costs. There is another way to divide up the piebased on each person's appetite. Charge them "per bite" rather than "per piece." This means looking at users' and departments' current actual utilization of telephony systems. This utilization can be expressed in number of calls, number of billed minutes, or just off-hook time. Utilization is a more precise method of distributing cost ownership. Most high-end PBX systems allow utilization reporting, and, if they don't, the phone company can perform a "traffic study" that may let you measure the same kind of statistics. That way, if Jake in the Marketing Department is using 75% of the system time, then the Marketing Department can be billed for 75% of the cost of the system, and so forth.
8.2.4.3 Overhead costsOverhead is that group of cost elements that aren't directly attributable to a particular user or department. A great example is a support agreement. These agreements are put in place, usually between the equipment vendor and the implementing organization, to replace faulty VoIP gear. These agreements tend to be paid for a year or two in advance. Their cost cannot be allocated using user-based or actual consumption approaches. If an IP phone in the Marketing Department breaks some time during the year, but the Support Department has no such breaks at all during that year, you won't know how to charge the two departments for the maintenance cost until the end of the year when all break/fix episodes have occurred and the maintenance period is ended. The costs are overhead because, at the time they're expended, they can't be applied anywhere with a sense of actuality. So figure on overhead costs being separate from your per-user and per-department cost. Instead, factor overhead costs into the big picture, the one that accounts for all users and all departments. But, most important, don't forget them in your budget. 8.2.4.4 The success deltaYou may discover through these cost-modeling techniques that certain users or departments cannot benefit from a cost reduction through VoIP. But what you'll probably find is that a majority of users will experience a drastic drop in the cost of their telephony applications. Just how much of a cost reduction is the question that measures your success as a VoIP integratorthis success delta predicts your ROI, and it is often the key selling point for a VoIP solution. 8.2.4.5 Service provider cost savingsA great place to look for savings when switching to IP telephony is on your company's phone bill. There are a number of ways a transition to VoIP can decrease your monthly dollar commitments with the phone company:
8.2.4.6 Internal management cost savingsBefore pitching VoIP in your organization, ask yourself if managing the voice network will ultimately be less expensive with VoIP than it has been without. Some who have integrated VoIP have discovered that, most notably in large environments, it takes less staff to manage the VoIP network than it did to manage the traditional telephony network. This may be because VoIP is "just another application" on the data network. It's also possible that it just takes a narrower skill set to support voice and data apps on the same network than it does to support them on separate ones. 8.2.4.7 How do you eat an elephant?The old question "How do you eat an elephant?" is usually answered , "One bite at a time." And this may be the way you choose to roll out VoIP technologies: one segment, one workgroup, or even one building at a time. But don't forget the big picture. If your VoIP rollout is staged into manageable hunks, don't lose sight of the as-built plan, that comprehensive vision of the completed project. Your cost-benefit analysis is usually based on the endgame scenario, where the big investment payoff resides. Table 8-1 shows a budget for a VoIP network. It considers all costs projected for a completely finished environment. It shows the monthly recurring and up-front costs and whether each cost is classified as capital (meaning it's an investment in durable goods like IP phones) and/or overhead. It's important to classify capital expenditures like IP phones and Ethernet switches because they have lasting material value for the companya softPBX could be sold later on, and it's an asset to the bottom line because it is worth something. Consulting and service agreements, conversely, may enhance operations but aren't capital: once they're consumed, they are gone forever. Table 8-1. Sample budget for a VoIP rollout
If you're rolling out IP telephony one department at a time, create a budget specifically for each department using per-user or consumption cost models. This will help you decide which pieces to bite off first and how best to spread out the costs on the more inclusive, projectwide budget.
There is no hard and fast rule for deciding which budgetary items are overhead and which items aren't. Generally, though, if it's difficult for you to associate the cost with a particular user or department, call it overhead. In this case, the hot-swap IP phones, which are there in case some of the 500 in-service phones break, are considered overhead because they aren't attributable to any one user or department at the time they are purchased. Through the magic of accounting, their costs can be tracked back to the right consumer at the time the phone breaks and the hot-swap phone takes its place. But, for now, they are overhead. 8.2.4.8 Recognizing revenue, productivity, and cost reductionThe success delta is the difference between what it costs to do business today and what it will cost to do business after the technology integration is complete. It describes, in dollars, what you hope to accomplish by adopting this new technology. It's also the difference between productivity today and productivity at completion. In some cases, it may be an expression of an increase in revenuefor example, a telephony service provider may convert to VoIP service in order to create a new revenue source. Table 8-2 is a sample worksheet that can help you recognize the sources of your revenue, productivity, and cost-reduction enhancements as a result of VoIP. Table 8-2. Sample success delta worksheet
Like the budget, you can break the success delta worksheet into smaller ones that account for a specific department or for a specific phase of the rollout. 8.2.4.9 Calculate the ROINow that you've recognized the source of VoIP's cost and identified its beneficiaries within your organization, it's a simple matter to figure out your ROI. This is the rate at which the new benefits of VoIP balance with its cost. The ROI is your principal tool in expressing your organization's rate of return yielded by this technology. To calculate the time of your ROI, use this formula: Up-front cost / monthly success delta = months to ROI Since the up-front investment in Table 8-1 is about $400,000, and your monthly success delta is $6,700, it will take your organization about 60 months to complete the ROI and begin to reap the payback of the project. 0,000 / ,700 per month = 60 months 8.2.5. Convenience and TimingAnother question to ask when considering Voice over IP has to do with timing and logistics. The following are scenarios particularly favorable to a VoIP rollout.
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