In fact, after 2005 studies showed that 32 percent of American firms were piloting VoIP, a Forrester Research survey in August 2006 showed that adoption rates were flat from the same period a year earlier. Forrester Research analyst Lisa Pierce declares that enterprise VoIP deployments in the United States "have stalled."

The reasons why will sound familiar to most CIOs: organizational deadweight, technology fear, uncertainty and doubt, and competing demands on network upgrading funds. But you can get through a VoIP pilot without stalling. We talked to CIOs who’ve done it, to look at some common and unexpected trouble spots, plus get advice on how to avoid or conquer them.

Unexpected Tech Troubles

The problem: Can you manage a VoIP network with your existing staff once it’s in place?

The answer: Be prepared for a few glitches, and get hands-on wisdom during install.

VoIP is supposed to make the phone system better, not make it stop ringing. But one early side effect of the way a new VoIP system had been implemented at Serta Mattress was causing phones to stop ringing for as long as 20 minutes at some of its factories.

For the not-so-sleepy mattress maker, VoIP emerged as a potential answer to the problem of rapid growth during the 1990s. Ambitious and judicious management took a mattress factory with a Serta license and built it up to the point where it acquired Serta itself: By 2003, the company had gone from three facilities to 23. Each of them had a telephone system (a PBX, in phone parlance), and each a maintenance contract, eating up between $500 and $1,000 per month.

Donna Zett, CIO at Serta, thought VoIP would give her a way to run a single PBX system, based at company headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill. That would save the company a bundle on maintenance, for starters (its VoIP system now costs it about $2,000 a month in maintenance). And since an internal study showed that 60 percent of its long-distance calls were between facilities, VoIP promised Serta savings on phone bills too.

Still, Zett trod carefully. She put three vendors—Cisco, Avaya and Sphere Communications—through their paces. That included access to reference customers with network and corporate structures similar to those of Serta. She even went to visit six of those reference customers. Serta chose Sphere, and spent about $150,000 and four months rolling out the VoIP system. Zett had her own staff work on the installation project, to make sure it could handle the new technology.