Telecom management is one area where centralized control
tends to generate better results. Of course it isn’t an absolute truth;
multinational companies must balance the benefits of
centralized management against the difficulties of managing infrastructures
in different countries with different languages, currencies, and
cultures.
It is our experience that policies and standards should be
defined globally as far as possible. This creates an environment where
teamwork and cross-regional support are possible, greatly enhancing the
efficiency of the human capital deployed across the organization. Here
we emphasize the need to have unified inventory databases, processes, and
technological standards. Sometimes, several arms of a large organization
spread around the world do not understand the benefits of unified policies
and standards. Usually, the telecommunications team in each country tends
to believe that its own ways are the best, but anyone who has managed
a multinational telecommunications area knows that having standards is
better, even if they are not going to be optimal in every environment.
When telecom management is centralized, it leads to the following benefits:
• better prices (usually due to
global negotiation, where the full weight of the organization is brought
to the table, yielding better discounts)
• better control (when only one
group is responsible for telecom resources, it usually reduces problems
such as overcharges, overlaps, and having unidentified resources or resources
that are not used)
• lower operational costs (when
headcounts are reduced, there is a consequent reduction in personnel
costs)
Centralizing control usually enables the organization to
identify its telecom expenses. That fact alone is usually enough to
justify centralization, because it shows how much telecom
represents within the IT/infrastructure budget and keeps the subject on
management’s radar.
In more general terms, we have to keep in mind that telecom
is a logistic system, and as such, the whole may be more than the sum of
the parts.
It would be interesting to insert a caveat into the argument
here that centralized management doesn’t necessarily mean a centralized
operation. If you have the right tools, you may be able to control and
contract in a centralized way and yet keep the operation distributed, enabling
different telecom teams to operate in different countries, for
example.
This is feasible, as long as you manage to make all teams
use the same management tools, under a defined hierarchical framework.
That means that the local telecom teams may have some autonomy to contract
telecom resources (the ones not covered for the worldwide contract,
for example), but they have to include each contract and resource in a
corporate telecom management tool in such a way that headquarters can see
all the telecom expenditures and all resources contracted in all
countries. The local teams will see only their own expenditures
and resources.
Therefore, we may divide the term “centralization” into two
types: financial and technical. Even if operational aspects force
technical decentralization, financial centralization remains crucial.
The centralized telecom management has to keep track of what is contracted
and how much it is costing. Financial centralization refers to
the following:
• centralized resource inventory
(including data, voice, and mobile resources)
• centralized contract inventory
(including voice, data, mobile services, and maintenance)
• centralized telecom bills (even
if received in different countries, all bills would be included in a
common tool in a standardized framework, allowing centralized control)
• centralized billing system
• centralized bill auditing process
(at least in a country basis) Technical centralization refers to the
following:
• centralized help desk for telecom
issues
• centralized point of contact with
the telecom providers
• centralized point of contact for
equipment maintenance
• centralized network operational center (NOC)
