Sound Off: Steve Elias of BAYCOM talks about RF-IT convergence

How has this changed the way you handle personnel and structure your business?

“We’ve got a decent-sized IT staff at BayCom. The dealers right now that don’t have an IT department are way behind the eight ball.”

“We’ve talked about taking the load off of our traditional RF techs and bringing [some of that work] into our IT techs and upgrading more of our IT staff. For example, my Motorola RF techs traditionally would handle the modems in the squad cars and so forth. Now, our IT staff is trained to do that.

“As for the software upgrades for the big P25 countywide networks, I’m sending my IT department for training on that right now, so they can go out and do the software upgrades with an RF tech being with them."

Have your hiring strategies changed?

“When we place an ad for an RF tech, the response is horrible. The last tech I hired, we had to bring him here from Alaska. Now, we’ve just changed our ad to ‘IT/RF technician,’ and we literally got four or five times the resumes in one week.”

“We are having success bringing the IT guys into the RF world, because they don’t really need to understand how that radio functions or understand the real indepth knowledge of it. They just need to know that it’s a two-way radio and that they push the button to talk, but we want them doing the software upgrades and hook those radios up to a monitor to tune and test the radios, and I think we’re going to have pretty good success on that front.”

Has this RF-IT convergence trend caused you to alter the way you train employees?

“More than ever, it’s all one now. It’s all becoming one where these technicians have to cross-trained and be able to the networking and the software upgrades and know the RF business to a certain extent. I don’t think we could get to the point where they’re all experts in all three phases of this, but it all needs to be integrated into the one technical-services business that we have.

“Without question, you’re going to see a real convergence on the services side of this business, to the point where organizations have to have all of these people. And, quite frankly, if they don’t, they’re just not going to be able to compete.”