|
|
article page
| 1
| 2
| 3
|
compound that with the fact that we're in telecom, in the internet, with a lot of dot com customers. We've seen just about everything that a market can throw at a company, given those forces. Our CEO, Jim Crowe, had the vision to be the worldwide leader in IP traffic transportation, using the IP framework, and we've stayed true to that. And because of the ups and downs in the telco sector, some of the things that were good and some that weren't so good, we've got a maniacal focus on cost management. It's part of our strategy to be the low cost transporter of bits, so everything's about driving out cost and operational excellence. Now we're trying to take that approach, and transform the way we interact and support our customers and try to build a world-class customer experience. We're always grounded on cost management, and we've been through some really tough times these last ten years, so this last couple of quarters have been hard on us as well, but it sort of feels like business as usual, because everything's about trying to drive out cost and improve experience and scalability.
|
|
“We've got a maniacal focus on cost management.” |
|
focusing on the service objects, leveraging the middleware, leveraging what exists in the applications, but also doing a lot of leading-edge customization to those applications. For example, we helped to design and build a real-time interface between our physical and logical inventories. On the scale of the inventory we manage, having that kind of capability is something that I don't believe anyone else has in production.
Pipeline: If you had to face a single biggest challenge that Level3 has faced in its transformation projects, what would it be?
Hart: There have certainly been some technical challenges, particularly data conversion and data cleanup, and standardization of models around whether something is equipment or product. But, I'd have to say, because we brought employees together from 8 different companies, and are
|
|
|
|
That's a long way of saying, for better or worse, this is business as usual for us.
Pipeline: Talking a bit more about your specific transformation plan, can we be more specific? Are you dabbling in IMS? NGOSS?
Hart: We have a pretty broad array of next-gen and in-leading services, from the XoIP suite, all the way to our content distribution (CDN), large objects, and streaming video. A lot of the emerging technology going across the internet. So, from an IMS perspective, we're putting intelligence in the network. Leveraging gear from Infinera and other equipment manufacturers is always part of our strategy. My role is really to try to simplify the connection between the customer, our back office, and our network, so we're doing a lot of BPM and SOA-based architecture. We're
|
|
still working on that, getting together with a common framework around what we're achieving and what we're moving to, and what the tradeoffs, both good and bad, are, to take the best of those 8 situations and other leading practices and getting people to rally around a new approach has been a real challenge. It can be difficult to get people to understand that, in some cases, steps of the process may take a minute or two longer in a certain functional domain, but it may shorten the end-to-end cycle time by days by giving additional information at that step in the process. It's the classic organizational change management, knowledge management, training, and continuous repetition of the fact that there is going to be hard work and suffering along the way in a multi-year journey, but to continue to reinforce the positive. So I would say that organizational
article page
| 1
| 2
| 3
|
|
|
|
