SureWest investment in back-office automation pays off

When SureWest Communications (NASDAQ: SURW) first began spreading its wings as a competitive overbuilder, expanding from its Roseville Telephone roots to building fiber-to-the-premises networks in neighboring communities, the need for new IT skills quickly became apparent. In addition to looking for that talent, however, SureWest did something else to streamline its operations and alleviate a talent drain: adopt a touch-free fulfillment system.

By completely automating its processes from service order through service delivery, SureWest eliminated the need for many hands-on operations and in the process also cut down deployment errors and costs of deployment, said Chief Information Officer Tim Dotson. This automated process also aided SureWest in integrating its traditionally skilled telecom technicians with the new IT skills needed for the all-IP, FTTP networks SureWest is now building.

"We know we need both sets of skills – the knowledge base and historical skill bases of both camps are really necessary," Dotson said. Each group has strengths and weaknesses, he added, and what SureWest needed was a convergence of those skills.

"The IT discipline is very much around a software development background – our software development life cycle, requirements development, code version management, things like that," Dotson said. "Now all of a sudden, those skills come more into play as they touch our customers through the telephony network. The traditional network skill set is becoming more acutely aware of software lifecycle management. As we move to all-IP, we are moving to computers with software on them versus hardware in the traditional telephony network.

"On the other side of the fence, the IT folks are having to become much more familiar and astute around core communications technologies – things like [quality of service (QoS)] as it relates to service delivery," Dotson said. "Also with regards to things like electronic gateways, which are traditional devices that hang on somebody's house and convert the optical signal to a coax signal inside the house."

The need to integrate those two skills is one thing that led SureWest to develop a zero-touch fulfillment organization, Dotson said.

"From the time one of our agents takes a request to have our triple-play service – voice, video and data, IP across the board – that order is electronically captured in our order and billing systems, and from that point, there is program-to-program activity without human intervention for the most part to identify what services have been ordered, what facilities exist from the [central office (CO)] all the way to the customer's house, what the topology of the network connection looks like, what gear is on the side of the home, what is inside the home and then how we can activate devices to light up service," Dotson said. "If there is no gear installed in the home, then there is a scheduled truck roll, and a technician will install what is needed. Then the technician makes a mobile request from his laptop to activate. That activation is more than just delivering a signal. The set-top box has to have the right channel lineup, depending on what the customer ordered. If they are paying for HBO, we want to deliver it. If not, we want to make sure it is blocked."