Reporting structure (who do you report to?)

[Redder]

Many changes have taken place over the past 5 years. With VOIP on a roll and consolidation of management and jobs, whom do you report to? Some facilities others MIS others maintain telecom separately.
Additionally what are some of the challenges you have encountered if you have merged into MIS or another group?

Immediately my challenge was to explain why we do not turn on international access and trunk to trunk transfer to the MIS Director and the CIO, however I did not present a good enough case until we got hit with 8K of international toll fraud one month..


D
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." Albert Einstein

 

[mikeydidit]

It seems the trend is to incorporate the Telecomm/IS departments. We are a state agency here, so we are still behind the times and are still separate inities. It still amazes me how it is so difficult to explain to the powers that be that the switch needs this or that until it hits the ole wallet. Then it is easy to get something like trunk to trunk transfer done then regardless of cost and even a survey of the switch done through Avaya security at that point. Before that point, you would have to fight them tooth and nail to get anything done. Oh and that was a small hit by the way. We got hit for $38,000 one weekend in case you were wondering how I could relate to your situation so well.

Hope this helps and please post if you need anything else.



Mike Jones
LSUHSC

 

[jeffjacobs]

Our company moved Telecom under MIS about 10 years ago. However it had always been its own area. As of last month we have been grouped in with the LAN WAN team. As for VOIP, our team lead refuses to do anything with it. I would like to see our company use things like IP agent and some of the new IP equipment for smaller offices instead of having Partners and Merlins all over the country.

As for toll fraud, we have always allowed international calling and trunk-to-trunk transfer. We do not allow calls to the Caribbean except to specific phone numbers identified by our business units as needed for legitimate calls. We have Call Accounting set up which alerts us to long calls. We have an AVAYA security audit every year. Finally, we are always sending out e-mail to our users about telecom hackers and how the work. We are constantly telling our users that unless they know the caller and where they are being transferred to, they are not to do a trunk-to-trunk transfer. Maybe we have just been lucky.

 

[RGarcia87]

Telcom and Network engineers are grouped together in our company, but we do not really do any cross-training.