Studies in VOIP

Lifetouch was particularly interested in getting closer to and better serving its customers by integrating call center technologies—for instance, being able to answer a phone call with e-mail. Technology Management also performed a bandwidth-utilization analysis to understand the network’s capacity to transmit data. Armed with its detailed knowledge about Lifetouch’s current system and service needs, the partners could move forward with implementation.

The pace of project deployment was a concern for Lifetouch. “We shared with Cheryl and her group our time frame and the requirements of the business drivers,” Kimball says. Lifetouch is extremely busy during the fall and spring when the company photographs and processes elementary student school portraits and senior photos, and publishes school yearbooks. Because of this, Lifetouch has a small time frame to initiate large projects, Mullen says.

The Results

Although the specific configuration of the telephone system is a work in progress, Lifetouch now has unified online chatrooms and e-mail for customer service agents at each workstation in the 40- to 50-person sales offices in Seattle and Phoenix. The decision to test the systems in a smaller setting before going live at corporate headquarters has helped Kimball and Mullen troubleshoot problems. O’Brien-Wilms says that moving into IP telephony is a little like opening Pandora’s box; unforeseen issues may arise as responsibility for the telephone infrastructure moves over to the IT department, and call center employees change over to a new system. Business disaster and continuity plans must be updated; security for the Internet, firewalls, antivirus software, and wide area network must be upgraded; and the cable wire infrastructure may need to be improved. Mullen says it will take three to four years for Lifetouch to finish installing the new system.

Supporting Growth

As Minnesota School of Business/ Globe College in Richfield neared the end of its service contract with their telecommunications provider, Adam Hite, the corporate director of IT and telecommunications at the school, met with Steven Siganos, an Integra Telecom of Minnesota salesperson, to discuss the school’s current network configuration and to evaluate what its future needs would be. Integra is a telecommunications carrier based in Portland, Oregon, with local headquarters in Bloomington.

The Approach

“The needs assessment by Integra was done on a one-year, three-year, and five-year plan, since the client’s main objective was to find a telecommunications company that could provide service to them during what was going to be a very robust growth period,” says Ken Worcester, Integra’s senior vice president and general manager. Globe College anticipated rapid growth in the number of its employees and locations, and increasing reliance on bandwidth.

After meeting with Integra, Hite came up with an engineering plan for the system, which he passed along to Integra. Integra came back with a plan for the system’s actual design. Ultimately, rapid expansion spurred Hite to move the project along quickly.

Integra changed Globe College’s previous telecommunications and data-service model to one that would support the growth it expected across its nine different locations. The new system is a mixture of digital and VOIP. “Redundancy is built into the computing environment, so when we lose a connection, there is a back-up,” Hite says. In addition, Integra designed a new network model using point-to-point T1s, which are digital wide area network connections that allow data, such as telephone calls, to move over a network.