SVM pros often are tasked with facilitating formal and informal discussions between IT operations and business stakeholders for input and feedback when attempting to evaluate and refine a strategy for new communications technology decisions and sourcing. Comms technology planning and sourcing should be centralized within IT in order to avoid islands of investments by business decision-makers who don’t want to wait for IT to work through a lengthy evaluation process that they’re not even involved in.

However, given the escalating pace of communications technology evolution (e.g., the iPad phenomenon), it’s more important than ever before to take measures to ensure an open dialog between the businesses and IT, specifically about new technology evaluations, testing, and proof-of-concept trials with vendors that IT is undertaking within its operational labs or on behalf of a division. SVM also can facilitate regular discussions between business stakeholders that include sharing lessons learned from recent proof-of-concept and pilot activities, etc.

Moreover, because telephony and mobility technologies and services in many distributed companies typically are provisioned by local market GMs, centralized IT SVM organizations often struggle to get some control over sourcing practices for the associated services. SVM, regardless of its mandate from IT’s steering committee, has to deal with more and more instances of self-provisioning by business leaders that bypass established processes.

By contrast, when communications between IT and the businesses are frequent, clear, and open, and when the businesses are regularly informed by the CIO and SVM about what other groups are doing respecting new technology solutions, what standards are in place regarding technology platforms, etc., and what alternative solution delivery choices are available (e.g., purchased and self-maintained/managed, vendor managed leased CPE, hosted/private dedicated cloud, private multitenant cloud/as-a-service, or fully outsourced), they're usually much more likely to follow established IT guidance and practices.