Toward a unified front

Establishing effective communications is a challenge in any company, but it’s even more so in one created through mergers and acquisitions, such as healthcare services provider Alere. Bryan Larrieu, vice president of IT operations, ended up at Alere after Inverness Medical Innovations acquired Matria Healthcare, where he ran IT. Matria merged with Alere Medical and ParadigmHealth in September 2008 to form the new Alere. Larrieu’s organization now is responsible for about 3,600 employees, six data centers, 15 sites with 50 or more people, five satellite offices and some 400 teleworkers. Unified communications technology has helped Larrieu cut costs, streamline communications and generate cooperative thinking.

VoIP is at the heart of many unified communications implementations. I imagine you have a mix, given all the mergers.I support five platforms from Cisco and Avaya. The longest has been in about seven years. We’ve had a Cisco IPCC [IP Contact Center] platform for at least five years in one of our legacy environments, and the Avaya VoIP platform in another legacy environment. The Avaya will be our platform going forward. It’s the larger of the implementations and is a more current generation.Are the 400 employees who work remotely using VoIP?Yes, they have VoIP and full [computer-telephone integration] with our applications, and instant messaging as well.Outline your unified communications platform.

Our primary platform is Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), which allows IM and video connectivity, as well as presence. We also offer videoconferencing on another platform, leveraging the same converged backbone for interoffice communications. We also use MOSS [Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007] for collaboration. That includes not just documents, but blogs and blogging forums where teams can post information and see updates to questions and/or documents. You can have a document of record that you don’t have to pull down to a local desktop, for example — changes can be made right on SharePoint. With the blogs, we do a lot of, “Does anybody know, has anybody seen, has anybody heard about?” And you’ll get various responses. MOSS also houses our intranet, so corporate communications are posted there, and some e-learning modules.

What about unified messaging — is it part of your VoIP platforms?It is, but we haven’t rolled it out. Ultimately, when we roll out Avaya, there will be shared voice mail and five-digit dialing, probably by year-end. In the next six to 12 months we’ll have full voice-mail integration, leveraging the Avaya platform. You’ll be able to pull voice mail from e-mail and even manage it from a GUI, so you can click on the icon and play it on your desktop, or drag and drop a message over to another mailbox. It’s interesting that you’ve had VoIP for that long, but haven’t implemented unified messaging yet. Why is that?Well, it’s been a challenge with all the integrations we’ve done. Matria had done four acquisitions in 24 months. Alere did three in the last 24 months. So, every time you’re getting ready to get something figured out, you’ve got to bolt on a new business. Priorities and investments change, and you get more focused on integration, so voice mail wasn’t on the top of the list.How do your employees use these unified-communications tools in their day-to-day work?IM is huge, when you want to quickly pull a group together and send out a uniform message. We also do conference calls with partners and customers, and IM allows us to share thoughts among ourselves outside of the call. Our developers also use IM to share lines of code. They’ll go into OCS and send a piece of code that can be used for testing right on the spot, or put it up for review in the forum, or collaborate on the code right there. We can bring in a video image as well. So, that kind of efficiency is a huge gain for us.What are some of the other ways you’re using video?To save on travel. We’re on the front end of our video implementation. We have at least one conference room in every site, and we’re starting to push it to the desktop. We’re probably 5% to 10% into the implementation, starting with IT, both operations and development.

It not only saves on travel, but a lot of times, it’s good to be able to see people’s mannerisms. You lose some of the emotional inflection and meaning in an e-mail construct. And often when you’re on a voice conference call, people are multitasking and e-mailing. You get better focus when you’re in a video forum.

Any numbers yet on what you’re saving?No, we haven’t been able to do a cost analysis from the standpoint of what we’re saving on travel. Even with the fluctuations in cost of travel, with the fuel charges, we haven’t gone that far. It’s more subjective than definitive data.How are you using blogs?We have a couple of architects who every Friday morning send out a blog on various topics, whether it’s architecture, an application, an infrastructure play, software-as-a-service or [service-oriented architecture] SOA. It stimulates thought about how we’re looking at new technologies and how we can implement or integrate them. You get a broad perspective because we’re marrying several different development teams because of all the integration activity.Was that kind of thought stimulation happening at all before?No, it wasn’t. It came about when we were looking at how best to leverage SharePoint Services. We knew that HR and operations each wanted a portal to share information. We [in IT] wanted to share reports up the chain regarding our metrics. And someone said, you know, we could use this as a portal for ideation. So it wasn’t part of the original rollout. It was just something that got born as we were looking at some of the tools within the tools.How are other groups using the blogging tool?It’s probably mostly IT today. I haven’t seen any of the other larger groups, such as HR or accounting, use it as much. They’re sharing a lot of internal documents, specifically forms, how-to and instructional guides, and company policy information, because we’re trying to get to one company. They primarily use [SharePoint] for interoffice and interdepartmental communications. Now they have a managed document repository, so they’re all working off the same document and they know it’s up to date.How about presence technology — is it changing life for employees?Let’s say I’m using workflow to route a document. I can tell whether you’re in or out of the office based upon your icon. If you’re not there, I’ll send the document around you to the next person in the approval chain. If I know you’re on vacation because you’ve posted that on your IM icon, then I’m not waiting for an e-mail from you. It allows us to keep things flowing.

Also, in any contact center, you have skills-based routing. If you’re fielding a call from a customer and you don’t have a certain skill set to take them to the next level, you can look within the group to see if an agent with the appropriate skills is available. That’s probably the biggest win we’ve gotten out of presence. And I can touch you in various ways — e-mail, chat, cell phone, desk phone. So, I can bring in the right level of expertise to support my customer. Or I can say, those resources are unavailable, let me take your number and call you back.

And these people can be anywhere right, such as nurses who work out of their homes?There is no way for you to tell whether I’m at home, in my car or in my office.What about the 400 people who work at home or in satellite offices? What do these tools mean to them?It allows me to find talent in other geographical regions and be able to communicate with them, both inbound and outbound, to effect our mission. That’s a huge upside, being able to tap resources outside your geographical region.

The other part is, it’s a morale booster if I can tell a person, you can work from home a couple of days a week so you don’t have to sit in traffic. I commute about three hours a day. Because I can work from home, I don’t have to jump in my car and lose those three hours of productivity. So, there’s benefit and gain there. Those two jump out.

Any other examples of how unified communications has changed the way people work?

We’ve got all sorts of applications on tap to push down to the PDA. From your PDA, you can send an e-mail to our procurement system, for example, and attach an electronic-procurement document invoice and sign it. So, where executives now use a laptop, [we’re trying to enable them to] instead do quite a few things on their BlackBerry or PDA.

What was driving the need for unified communications?There’s a desire for what I call ubiquitous computing — being able to access our environment anytime, anywhere to improve productivity. [That also enables us] to attract and retain resources that aren’t nailed to a specific geographical region. And there was an opportunity to reduce our costs by collapsing our voice and data wires onto one backbone. There was also an efficiency play: We had developers asking for it because they wanted to be able to collaborate on designs and thoughts. And there was a morale-builder, in that we could [let employees work from] home. So there was a whole lot of upside in there.How did you get buy-in? What was the business case?Cost avoidance. We brought it to the business as an opportunity and got immediate buy-in.Have the numbers played out like you expected?So far. Our original assessments have changed greatly because the original numbers didn’t have the three new companies bolted together. So, the math is still good, but it’s a larger number. Originally, for telecom we realized about $1.2 million in savings just from collapsing our voice and data circuits onto one backbone.What were some of the biggest challenges you had in rolling this out?The first thing was to teach the company how to leverage technology to improve productivity. The other piece of it was getting business to sign off on the upfront capital required, because the capital outlay was kind of large; but then you start realizing savings year over year. But ultimately, when you look at the ROI model, they see the back side of it.Any technical challenges?WAN simulation. Making a test environment that’ll simulate 700 miles between sites leveraging voice, video and data. Otherwise, I needed voice engineers who understood QoS and was able to hire them. We had some voice guys but they didn’t understand QoS in terms of nailing up bandwidth for quality video and audio. They don’t do well with latency and the notion that once you turn it up, you don’t just walk away. It’s something that takes care and feeding. So I got two guys — one who is an architect and one who supported a similar environment for another company.Once you implement these unified communications tools, how do you go about getting people to use them?Instant messaging took no time to do. Videoconferencing was kind of a mandate. We went to HR and the executive team and said, we have a way to reduce travel costs. They challenged employees, asking them if meetings could be done via video vs. getting on a plane. So, we got executive support on the video piece, and that’s big in terms of getting people to use it. But we also had people trying to get more out of their resources to become more productive. So, they were kind of a natural migratory path. And most of us have kids who IM, and we’re trying to keep up with them. My kids told me e-mail was old hat.How would you say unified communications has affected decision-making in the company?It’s greatly improved it, because now I can quickly bring together all the people whom I need to make the decision. And I can do it via video if I so choose or set up a chat. So, getting the right people to make decisions more quickly together is a big gain.What has surprised you the most about your unified communications deployment?The [high] quality of the voice and the video calls going across the wide area, even over a large number of miles.What’s been your biggest disappointment with the technology?The lack of deep-level skill sets at the provider level. We generally blow right past Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, in terms of their ability to help us. Unified communications is a new bird. They typically have one guy who understands voice, one who understands video and one who understands data. But [we need] a guy who can walk you through what QoS looks like if you’re using platform A, B or C.

Desmond is events editor for Network World and president of PDEdit, an IT publishing company in Southborough, Mass. Reach him at paul@pdedit.com.