[MUSIC]
AMES HALL:
What I really
love about working at
Lumen Technologies is our
vision for the future.
We have moved from being
a telecom company for many
many years to a network company,
to this idea of a
platform company.
We have brought together
several different companies,
each with their own
processes, procedures,
even different
networks and products,
and trying to merge
those together
is really one of the
biggest hurdles.
We had to make a very hard pivot
when everything went home,
when everything went mobile
to have our instructors,
our facilitators go from
classroom instruction
in-person to a virtual world.
CRISTI ROBB:
The Lumen Makers community is comprised of
business users and IT
people across the company.
CHUCK IDEN:
Talent development is our
first case of where we're using
Teams not only as
a collaborative
development environment,
but were users actually
go and access the tools.
AMES HALL:
Chuck said,
"Where are your pain points?"
And we started to say, well,
our big one is how do
we set up classes?
How do we enroll people?
I need to get a
couple of things done
with one of the class sessions,
can you show me how to do that?
CHUCK IDEN:
Absolutely.
AMES HALL:
Okay.
CRISTI ROBB:
Microsoft Teams and Power Platform
allows us to build efficiency.
A lot of the business
processes we use to run
through spreadsheets or
we used to run in email can be
accommodated for in Teams
with automated processes.
CHUCK IDEN:
They needed
a simple way for
people to request
vendor training,
and the current
process they had,
it was very error-prone,
so the Power App
reduced the errors.
The next piece was,
we needed a way to capture
certifications
throughout the company.
The app would enable anyone
in the company to say,
okay, I've got
the certification and
here is when it ends.
Then they would get
notifications like,
your certification is
getting ready to expire.
But it also enables to report,
so when it came time at
those competitive
sale situations like,
look here is our team,
because this is something that
enables a competitive advantage
where we're in a sale situation.
AMES HALL:
Now we deliver on
Microsoft Teams.
We have the Power App,
we have our chat channels,
so everything is happening
within one interface.
Now we have these Power Apps
where within a few minutes,
and I love saying minutes
rather than days,
we can set up a class,
we can enroll people
in that class,
we can make changes
to that enrollment,
and then we can close out
the class at the end.
That extra admin time
that they were taking
up can now be reallocated
to platform time.
More platform time means
more time in front
of our sellers,
which means better training.
I think the big shift with
the Lumen Makers is
that we're putting
the ability to create
these collaborative apps
into the hands of the people
who are closest to the work.
Microsoft Teams and Power
Platform really gives us
a way to meet our internal
customers where they live,
and I see the future just
growing because the
platform keeps growing.
[MUSIC]