eircom

Telecom Company Calls on Integrated Collaboration Solution to Optimize Productivity

Irish telecommunications company eircom has recently moved to its new corporate headquarters in Dublin. The prospect of a state-of-the-art, modern work environment encouraged management to think about helping information workers move away from the manual, paper-based processes and face-to-face meetings that lingered from eircom’s history as a state-run company. eircom partnered with Microsoft to design its ‘New World of Work Program,’ a philosophy that focuses IT strategy on the information worker as the underpinnings of a new corporate culture. eircom then began implementing a suite of Microsoft® technologies chosen to optimize business productivity through improved communication and collaboration. The results of an early pilot project show tangible productivity improvements and time savings adding up to a potential value of many millions of euros.

Situation

eircom is the leading provider of land-line telecommunications services in Ireland, with 68 percent of that market’s revenue share. As such, it also has the most extensive land-line telecommunications network in the country. eircom serves more than 1.2 million customers and provides advanced voice, data, and Internet services to residential, business, enterprise, and government markets. In addition, the company is the leading broadband service provider in Ireland, with 43 percent of the retail share of the broadband market and serves almost 600,000 customers. eircom also owns Meteor, the third player in the Irish mobile market. Based in Dublin, eircom Group has 1,150 telephone exchanges around Ireland and 25 offices that employ more than 7,000 people.

Evolving Industry

The telecommunications industry in Ireland is changing. “We are a progressive company that has to remain one step ahead, and we need to start using the technologies that we are selling to our customers to our own competitive advantage,” says Stephen Mulligan, Web and Mobile Technology Manager at eircom IT. “The rise in broadband adoption, the proliferation of IP networks, and the huge market for 3G-based mobile communication services and Internet Protocol TV are all areas of opportunity in this fast-moving business.”

Legacy Corporate Culture

According to Mulligan, who has been with the company since 2001, eircom’s history as a state organization contributes to an interesting dichotomy within the organizational culture. “The last 10 years in eircom has seen a marked migration away from many of our legacy cultural practices,” he says. “Many new people have joined eircom, bringing new experiences and new expectations about working productively. We need to reduce our reliance on paper and improve the way that information moves around the organization. We should use process as a tool to improve productivity, not simply for compliance purposes.”

eircom IT had traditionally focused on supporting the transactional systems and the telecommunications upon which the company depends. For information workers, IT remained in the background—important, but not of any immediate tangible value to their everyday work. File shares proliferated on the network where people could store shared documents, but no versioning or check-in/check-out capabilities were in place and sharing access was difficult. Most people communicated using e-mail messages or the telephone. In 2005, Mulligan requested Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005 to introduce instant messaging (IM) to his colleagues, but learned that he was unable to do so, because eircom did not have Active Directory® service, the directory service that’s integrated into the Windows Server® operating system.

“I was tired of wasting time calling people on the phone and getting their voice mail, but when I tried to suggest changes at that time I was hampered by our technology infrastructure,” he says. “We were in the process of migrating our network infrastructure towards Microsoft technologies but we still had the Novell Netware operating system acting as our directory and file and print infrastructure. We needed to think more intelligently about the role of technology in supporting the information worker, and so we started thinking about acquiring an integrated technology stack that would allow us to optimize business productivity throughout eircom.”

Time for Change

eircom executives faced another hurdle in the guise of the company’s outdated buildings. eircom had deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, but there was only one LAN connection in each meeting room, so participants would not be able to use their laptop computers to connect to the intranet to share documents, agendas, or meeting minutes. “Even if we tried to adopt new collaboration or productivity technologies, we couldn’t, because we didn’t have the right physical or technological underpinnings to move ahead,” recalls Mulligan.

Office Communicator will be a ubiquitous tool at eircom. Microsoft technologies are agile and intuitive enough to automate business processes without forcing us to change: that’s the New World of Work. Stephen Mulligan Web and Mobile Technology Manager, eircom IT

All that changed when eircom commissioned a new building for its Dublin headquarters in late 2004. This afforded a valuable opportunity for the company to create a state-of-the-art office space capable of supporting wireless networking and the latest business productivity tools. It was the perfect time to evaluate what technology would be the best for the 1,500 staff members who would be working there, especially in the area of communication and collaboration.

“The new building provided us with an ideal focal point and an incentive to start thinking about optimizing our business productivity,” says Mulligan. “As the construction began on the building, we began a search for the right technologies to support a modern, fast-paced work environment where we can make decisions faster and reduce delays trying to reach each other.”

Solution

After a series of meetings with the Microsoft team in Ireland, eircom management made a strategic decision in early 2007 to optimize its business productivity infrastructure using an integrated Microsoft solution. These initial discussions focused more on business value than technology limitations and proved to be an important catalyst to evolve organizational culture at eircom.

New World of Work

During the meetings, eircom adopted a new philosophy, which was quickly endorsed by company executives. Called the ‘New World of Work,’ this program attempts to put the needs of the information workers front and center in determining IT technology investments. According to the New World of Work, technology projects should be undertaken as business productivity projects. Business stakeholders are asked to prioritize their workday challenges dealing with information overload—and their expectations for a solution—before any technology is purchased. Once technology is introduced, however, it should function transparently as information workers integrate it seamlessly into their everyday business processes.

“The New World of Work program fits exactly with our way of thinking, so we adopted the name within eircom,” says Mulligan. “It allowed us to adopt a new productivity paradigm and think about how it would work in our culture. So, instead of saying to people, ‘Here’s some new technology; this is how you use it to fix your problem,’ we explain to them, ‘These are some business processes that have you have identified; here’s how we can improve them.’ It’s not about looking at isolated issues and buying a single product to fix them; it’s about looking at systemic productivity problems that affect processes across the organization.”

Figure 1 - eircom’s vision for a New World of Work is built on a suite of Microsoft business productivity technologies.

eircom chose a suite of integrated technologies from Microsoft, as well as other vendors, that encompass server and desktop products to solve those systemic problems and optimize productivity. “Microsoft has done a great job of integrating its products, especially the 2007 Microsoft Office release with Office SharePoint Server 2007,” says Mulligan. “They all work in harmony, and that’s exactly what we want our people do to. The technology is no good in isolation. With the New World of Work, we envision people using the technology as an integral part of their job, intuitively combining the products throughout their day. What’s also really important is that the products from Microsoft can work in harmony with those from the other vendors. This standards-based approach makes deploying these technologies much easier.” (See Figure 1.)

Ease of use was another factor in eircom’s decision. eircom reasoned that products offering a simple, familiar user interface are more likely to be adopted, even by staff used to more manual business processes.

Streamlined Technology Acquisition

In May 2007, eircom decided to purchase the Microsoft technologies it had identified as a strong foundation for optimizing its infrastructure to support the New World of Work. “Microsoft has been a great partner in helping us develop our vision, and our account team demonstrated the value of purchasing Microsoft products through an Enterprise Agreement,” says Mulligan. “With a single, comprehensive agreement, we can achieve the unified communications, enhanced content management, and automated business process that we seek.”

eircom’s Enterprise Client Access License Suite agreement includes Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and CALs for a suite of server products, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (including the Office Communicator 2007 client software). Under the terms of the agreement, eircom can upgrade to the latest version of these products at any time.

A Better Infrastructure

Construction has just finished on the new building at 1 Heuston South Quarter. (See Figure 2.) The new building has well-equipped meeting rooms, ubiquitous wi-fi with informal meeting areas, a cashless restaurant, and a meet-and-greet system for visitors. When visitors arrive at the building, the receptionist captures their details and takes their photo. This information is sent by e-mail and SMS to the receiving staff member and is printed on a reusable guest badge. The IT department upgraded the local area network and the wide area network to increase the speed and quality of eircom’s network infrastructure. Then it deployed Windows Server 2003, making Active Directory its core directory service. The IT department also deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Meanwhile, Mulligan and his colleagues promoted the New World of Work to department heads around the company and found they were a receptive audience.

Collecting Evidence with Pilot Program

In March 2008, Mulligan began a pilot project focused on Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007. He offered the technologies to approximately 200 people in the IT, networks, wholesale, and retail areas of the business. These users extensively used the Presence, IM and Voice and Video Calling functions. The sales teams expressed interest in being able to use Presence and IM to stay in contact while working away from the office. The IT teams who are often dispersed across the country found great benefit in simple video conferencing and the rich presence data offered by Office Communicator 2007, the client application for Office Communications Server 2007.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 was used by the pilot group for a number of sites. The highest profile of these sites was an informational portal for Internal Communications about the new building and the New World of Work itself. The 1 Heuston South Quarter site had more than 35,000 hits in its first month of operation and the New World of Work had more than 14,000 hits.

“We wanted to see what people thought about the environment, and we wanted to establish a proper demonstration system,” says Mulligan. “We also wanted to support our business case, and we needed their feedback to demonstrate tangible productivity improvements to management before we rolled it out to the rest of the company. The pilot more than met our expectations. We had endorsement from Gerry Quinn, our IT Director, and Rex Comb, our Chief Executive Officer is very excited about it.”

Benefits

As the New World of Work program rolls out across the company, employees will be using a suite of integrated Microsoft technologies to support a whole new paradigm of productivity. “eircom is changing with the times, but it’s a large organization, and this is not going to happen overnight,” says Mulligan. “We reaffirmed our commitment to Microsoft at this important juncture because we see long-term value in our relationship, which will help us on our journey.”

Mulligan and his team are encouraged by the results of the pilot project, which they see as a preview of the benefits to come when they roll out Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 to the entire organization later in 2008. Based on comments from the 120 respondents in the pilot project, the company can expect improved business capabilities including better communications, collaboration, and content management to drive business innovation. And because the technologies offer a familiar user interface, the company expects information workers to quickly adopt the new productivity tools.

Supports Business Innovation

eircom’s pilot project revealed productivity benefits across the company in many different scenarios, proving that even in a knowledge workers’ environment, it is possible to measure tangible benefits. Based on an average labor cost, Mulligan estimates that even a conservative time savings of 30 minutes per week for just 1,500 eircom employees would amount to approximately €950,000 (U.S. $1.48 million) in productivity gains.

Using Office Communications Server 2007, the pilot participants documented impressive time savings and improvements in communication through presence information and instant messaging. One person estimated a time savings of up to 20 percent, or one entire day a week in trying to find and talk to people.

“I’ve had a higher success rate in contacting people who are indicated as available, and estimate that my success rate was 90 percent compared with a normal rate of 40 percent,” said a Project Manager working in the IT department.

These benefits extend to eircom’s mobile workers. “Less e-mail, less fixed voice mail, less SMS [Short Message Service], less mobile voice mail, more quick answers to quick questions make home working seamless,” reports one telecommuter.

“Office Communicator will be a ubiquitous tool at eircom,” adds Mulligan. “Microsoft technologies are agile and intuitive enough to automate business processes without forcing us to change: that’s the New World of Work.”

In the pilot, staff used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to host internal Web sites and to set online workspaces for collaboration on documents. Once in the new building, eircom expects that meeting attendees will use portable wireless computers to take notes and mark up documents during meetings. Those unable to attend in person will be able to participate through voice or video conferencing, made possible by state-of-the-art screens in the meeting rooms.

“Each video conference call has the potential to save me up to eight hours of travel,” says a Project Manager in the IT department. And instead of filing away important documents so they are hard to find, information workers at eircom can define workflows to electronically share content with the right people.”

“Using Office SharePoint Server to share documents between departments gives us continual access to the information we need,” reports a Portfolio Manager in the Marketing department. “And it helps manage the versioning and security of important documents and project plans.”

When eircom employees perform document reviews, share information, and collaborate using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, they can make better decisions faster, an effect Mulligan anticipates will snowball throughout the company. “Providing people with productivity-enhancing tools opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Mulligan. “Now that we have the technology to support us, we can be more innovative in how we get things done.”

Drives Adoption through Familiarity

eircom has a long-term vision to roll out Line-of-Business Applications (LOBs) that connect with Office SharePoint Server 2007. The LOBs would be integrated into familiar Microsoft Office programs on the desktop to link people to transactional systems like SAP through the Business Data Catalog.

Figure 2 – eircom’s new headquarters is a state-of-the-art facility that supports the the company’s New World of Work initiative.

“If we can use SharePoint and Office programs as the front end to transactional business data through Office SharePoint Server, then any new workflows or line-of-business applications we build should be an easy sell,” says Mulligan. “We have already developed an intranet site for the new building and in the future would like to put our product development process through a SharePoint workflow. These initiatives have gone a long way to pull people in. They see how easy it is to work with this technology, and that’s driving adoption.”

Promotes the Strategic Role of IT

Like the company itself, eircom’s IT department is experiencing a paradigm shift in the way it operates. Instead of reacting to business issues when there is a crisis, the IT department has evolved into a more proactive organization that helps drive change in the organization.

“We are trying to get in front of the business requirement, instead of waiting in the background for our customers to come to us,” says Mulligan. “This whole project has helped us become more of a strategic asset to the organization. There’s a long journey ahead, but we’ve had a great beginning!”

 

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For more information about eircom products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.eircom.ie/enterprise