By Tim Young

Pipeline:  What is Level3 doing in the realm of transformation?

Kevin Hart, CIO, Level3 Communications:  Well, first a little background on Level3: We operate the largest internet backbones, running in North America and Europe, with probably about 20% of the IP traffic coming across our network. That alone is a challenge to operate. On top of that, I joined in early 2005, and I had run the Global OSS Practices for Cap Gemini, and had done a lot of transformation work throughout my almost ten years as a consultant, so when I joined, I wanted to transform the way Level3 operated, particularly from the quote-to-cash perspective. Looking at reforming our processes. Focusing on profitability from a product standpoint and trying to drive out cost. We launched a framework around systems improvement in 2005, and subsequently went on a pretty significant acquisition run and acquired about 8 companies in about a 24-month time period. That made the transformation effort that much more critical to our success.

Typically, a company is trying to transform from point A to point B, but we had added 8 additional data points. We launched an effort called 'unity,' which was basically about taking some of the TM Forum next-gen framework and simplifying the customer care, quoting, order entry, and putting in more consistent workflow and order management capability using a BPM tool called Savvion, and consolidating our network inventory, both physical and logical, using the Telcordia suite. Those are the core applications, but as you know, it's really about the product definitions, the process definitions, the cleanup, the data conversion, the configuration of that environment, and then really having the culture of the company align around a different way of doing things. It's a multi-year journey, but staying true to the vision and celebrating the successes and overcoming the occasional thing that sets you backward, has really been the summary of what we've been

cost, and enabling our employee-owners to operate on this new framework, and it's transforming the way that we operate day-in and day-out.

Pipeline: It's interesting that you've been able to move in the direction of a strategic vision that's taken some time, but seems to be paying off now. With the economy doing what it's doing, a lot of companies are sacrificing long term strategy for the sake of short-term cost savings. Do you have any comment on that?

Hart: We're at a unique intersection of a lot of dynamic forces here, as the company's basically in its tenth or eleventh year, from a start-up, building from the ground up as a company. Then you add in multiple acquisitions over the last few years, and