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Voice
Communication in Business Volume 1
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The Author |
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Preface |
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Dedication |
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Foreword by Jerry A. Goldstone |
The author
In an age when everyone specializes in communications, it requires a fair amount of communication just to find out what is meant: does a person work in media, for instance, perhaps as a TV actor or as a newspaper writer; in the design of electronic equipment that may be used in communication systems; or, just possibly, does the communicator manage the communications of a company or institution? Because these branches of the art seldom communicate with each other, individual practitioners are often unaware of the existence of branches other than their own.
Lee Goeller has worked in all three branches, starting as a radio writer and announcer. He moved into the technical areas of broadcasting and later, after a year in the Air Force, went to the University of Virginia where he received his undergraduate and Master's degrees in electrical engineering. He then spent 12 years at Bell Labs, working on the electronic telephone switching system that ultimately became No. 1 ESS.
After returning to college and becoming a PhD dropout, he went to RCA where he worked on military switching systems for a while before finding his way into the corporate staff group which manages RCA's internal telecommunications. In this new role of professional customer, he learned things about communication that nothing in his previous career had even suggested. Upon going into private consulting practice, his knowledge has been expanded even further. Reverting to a mode not unlike that of a radio announcer and writer, he shares that knowledge through seminars, articles and books such as the present volume.
Working out of Haddonfield, New Jersey, assisted by a small computer that doubles as a word processing system and a means for making complex calculations, Lee's $250 a month phone bill shows that he takes full advantage of communications to handle his countrywide business.
Preface
The 1970s, perhaps the most interesting decade in the century-long history of telecommunications, will be remembered for two things. First, electronics came of age, and second, the monopoly control of the telephone system was shattered. It is very unlikely that the second could have happened without the first; the telephone business has existed for a very long time, handling, often with barbaric hardware, some of the most sophisticated processes involved in human interaction. To design, manufacture and operate successfully the older equipment, making it function properly and economically on a nationwide basis, required a coordination of effort that could hardly have been achieved without the "vertical integration" of many branches.
Whether or not the system will continue to function with many equipment manufacturers and transmission vendors remains to be seen. It appears to me, however, that without high-yield, low cost, Large Scale Integration (LSI) circuitry, microprocessors and computer programming techniques, the "interconnect" business would never have gotten off the ground.
Consider a simple example: almost any high-school student can write a computer program to count trains of pulses and store the results in a memory. But just try to do this with relays. It's much harder, and requires much more space and specialized equipment. The telephone industry couldn't wait for computers. Now that computers are here, however, it is hard for many telephone people to realize that many of their complex skills, learned over a lifetime, are not going to remain relevant much longer.
On the other side of the coin, it is startling to find how little the people designing the new, "innovative" hardware know about the problems they're supposed to be solving. In general, they have copied the telephone industry blindly, often with ludicrous results. And computer manufacturers in particular, upon entering the telephone business, have often been the last to see that non-voice communication, typical of that needed by computers, can be readily integrated into the telephone systems of the future.
Modern electronics has made interconnect practical. In the first place, LSI lets large numbers of logic circuits be organized in a small space with considerable economy and, perhaps most important, with very high reliability. Thus, complex circuits can be designed and plugged in, and serviced when they finally go bad by simply removing one plug-in unit and substituting another. Using stored program techniques, specialized circuitry is often unnecessary; LSI memories can store program instructions that perform functions (such as the pulse counting mentioned above) when run on a microprocessor. This lets systems be updated (in many instances) by simply changing the program without changing the hardware. One often inserts a new magnetic tape cassette from the factory, pushes the button, and has a whole new set of features.
With this approach to maintenance and updating, the craftsmen who maintain new systems often need only learn how to change circuit packages and reload programs. Indeed, most maintenance can be done from a data terminal at a remote location. Thus, entry into the telephone business is made much easier. Staying in also is made easier because of the higher reliability of modern components which reduce operating overhead; electromechanical systems increase their maintenance costs fairly rapidly with age, but modern electronic systems, having no moving parts and generating less heat than vacuum tubes, are likely to require minimum maintenance over their entire useful lives.
With this revolution in hardware striking rapidly in the last half of the 1970s, the business communication manager, often with many duties other than telecommunications, has been hard pressed to know what to do. Advertising, public relations releases, and magazine articles tell him to free himself from the telephone company and save 30% on his telephone costs. He is exhorted to buy a digital PBX to be ready for the "office of the future." Systems and services come along every day, all claiming to be new, innovative, and the key to tomorrow.
Sadly, most of this deluge is just plain wrong. I wish that I, like other people with a passionate faith in the future, could honestly say that anything operated by a computer is better than anything done with older technology, and that if something is "modern," it is cost effective. But facts are facts. A pushbutton telephone costs twice as much as a phone with a rotary dial; an electronic PBX costs from two to four times as much as an old fashioned Step-by-Step system and often does less; there are two major forms of digital switching and transmission equipment on the market, each having many variations and most being incompatible with one another; and inexpensive telephone calls, when you can't hear the other party, are not a bargain.
Personally, I feel that the future of communications includes voice and non-voice traffic alike, and that one digital system can be arranged to handle the whole package. But we are not yet within reach of that goal, and we may never be. Unless and until we all know what the game is, and some of the rules by which it is played, we may not even know what we stand to lose. Electronic digital systems with computer control are the right way to go, but one must know WHAT TO DO as well as what components to use. If one does the wrong thing, the choice of components, even if digital and modern, cannot prevent disaster.
It is my hope that the following chapters, most of which originally appeared as articles in Business Communications Review, will give communication managers, equipment designers and vendors, and others interested in telecommunications some insight into what modern communication is all about and how, during a most interesting decade, it has shifted and changed. The future IS going to be much better than the past, but it won't just happen. We have to make it happen. If we know where we are heading, maybe we can get there.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Kay and Nelson who tried to teach me how to write, and to A.F., A.E.J., Ferg, E.J.T. and "the Wiz" who gave me something to write about.
Foreword
I'll never forget the first time I met Lee Goeller. I was giving a seminar in Philadelphia on major developments in the telecommunications industry and, as luck would have it, he decided to attend. People who give a lot of talks, as I do, become accustomed to running into differing views from members of the audience, and quickly develop a broad tolerance ... and a thick skin. But nothing in my experience had prepared me for Lee!
I think he must have disagreed with about half the things I said, and delighted in telling me so in front of the rest of the audience. The result was that much of the day turned into a dialog between the two of us. By the time the session was over, I was exhausted, but I had the strong feeling that Lee had enjoyed himself immensely and would have been happy to continue the discussion long into the evening.
I didn't hear from him again for several months. Finally, he sent me an article he thought I might be interested in publishing. I was. And this was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship that has included many articles, seminars and a book
It was obvious from our first meeting that Lee is a person with strong views, and the ability and willingness to express them. But over the years, I have also come to view him as very special. Special in his single-minded dedication to users of business communication systems. Special in his curiosity as to why things work as they do, whether they be pieces of equipment or network optimization techniques. And special in his ability to write about complex, technical subjects in a way that is understandable to non-engineers—and to do it with great wit and style. Nowhere is this latter quality more evident than in the opening sections of "A Requiem for Step" (Chapter 20) and "Those Awful PBX Proposals" (Chapter 8), as well as in Chapter 1, "Searching for the Telephone Company"—a short story that speaks volumes about why the telephone companies have so many problems in meeting competition.
The title of this book is Voice Communication in Business. The last word is the operative one. There are any number of books on various aspects of voice communication, but few that deal with the problems of the business user in the era of competitive communication systems and services. These problems often must seem almost insurmountable to the communication manager: dealing with an increasing number of vendors and multi-vendor systems, evaluating conflicting equipment and service proposals, understanding enough about the multitude of new products to make intelligent choices that will meet real needs, and preparing for an uncertain future.
This book illuminates some of the issues and problems that face the business communication user. Underlying the various topics is a somewhat chronological progression from the early days of competition, circa 1969, through today and into the future. In this sense, it is beneficial to read the book from beginning to end rather than reading chapters in a random order. If you do so, you will be left with a feeling of having journeyed through the competitive era of business communications. It is a journey I highly recommend to all who think of themselves as professionals in this rapidly changing field.
Jerry A. Goldstone
(Jerry Goldstone is the founder of Business Communications Review)
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Copyright 2006 Lee Goeller. All Rights Reserved.