Interactive Intelligence Blog - The IT Cultural Shift Created by Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure

The IT Cultural Shift Created by Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure

Posted on 01 Dec 2010 by Donna Fluss

Donna Fluss

Guest Blog: By Donna Fluss, President, DMG Consulting LLC

The hosting/cloud computing revolution has major ramifications for IT and telecom groups. It is driving changes in the mix of skills needed by IT personnel; specifically, technical managers need to be more business savvy and better able to deal collegially with their business partners. While this transformation will be difficult for many IT groups, it should benefit the enterprise, as it will help IT better understand and align themselves with their business colleagues. This was not a planned goal of hosting, but it will turn out to be one of the overarching benefits for many organizations.

Hosting also changes the composition of the work performed by IT, and therefore the required expertise. Here are some of the changes that enterprises experience when they adopt hosted/cloud-based contact center solutions:

• Demands more strategic thinking about the planned use of contact center solutions
• Requires fewer on-site IT resources to maintain the telephony and contact center environment
• Reduces the need for in-house contact center technical expertise and specialists in areas such as computer telephony integration (CTI)
• Requires fewer IT resources to maintain and upgrade the contact center servers
• Requires fewer IT resources to perform database administration
• Requires fewer telecom resources to handle contact center moves/adds/changes
• Increases the need for IT to function in a consultative manner to ensure that the business receives the functionality it needs on a timely basis
• Increases importance of third-party integrations and the need to oversee the integrated applications
• Requires careful monitoring and management of service level agreements

Companies that have migrated to hosted contact center solutions still need IT expertise, but instead of being dependent upon in-house staff to install, maintain and upgrade their applications, IT staff is needed to ensure that the business gets the resources required to meet their goals on a consistent and timely basis.

If you have any questions, please contact me at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com or 973-325-2954.

Donna Fluss, President, DMG Consulting LLC

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Tags: Best Practices, Contact Center, Market Trends and News

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Comments

Ismael commented on Wednesday, 1-Dec-2010

Hi,Donna.
While i acknowledge you make some valid points regarding the benefits of moving the Contact Center infraestructure to the cloud, i strongly disagree in some others. I'm convinced the latter apply (or should apply) the same to hosted as well as on premise solutions.
Let me go through your check list and give my (humble) opinion about every point.
Here I go:

• Demands more strategic thinking about the planned use of contact center solutions
False. That should be the golden rule regardless where the contact Center is located.

• Requires fewer on-site IT resources to maintain the telephony and contact center environment
Granted.

• Reduces the need for in-house contact center technical expertise and specialists in areas such as computer telephony integration (CTI)
False. CTI integrations could prove very useful to enrich the OOTB Contact Center functionality by integrating it with the rest of business application to create real value. More than if the Contact Center system is hosted or not, it's important to account for how clean, easy and high level are the APIs the vendor provide for this integrations.

• Requires fewer IT resources to maintain and upgrade the contact center servers.
Granted.

• Requires fewer IT resources to perform database administration
Granted.

• Requires fewer telecom resources to handle contact center moves/adds/changes
False. Again, it doesn't depend on how the service is provided. Having said that, i admit Contact Center vendors that make their product available to be properly hosted, struggle themselves to offer more easy to use and intuitive administration tools, but that's not intrinsic to the Cloud. It could apply to pure on premise solutions as well.

• Increases the need for IT to function in a consultative manner to ensure that the business receives the functionality it needs on a timely basis
False. That should be the rule regardless where the contact Center system is indeed located.

• Increases importance of third-party integrations and the need to oversee the integrated applications.
False. Well designed and planned third-party integrations can add significant value. This rule applied to both hosted or on-premise Contact Centers. Again, it's not exclusive for hosted offers.

• Requires careful monitoring and management of service level agreements.
False. That is an important premise that should be observed in either case.

Regards

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