On the inside looking out

Few are called to a level of dedication demonstrated by firefighters, health care workers and volunteers in New York and Washington recently. But similar traits — going a step beyond expectations, responding well to crisis and performing under pressure on a daily basis — are also part of the makeup of the men and women who manage communications networks.

The folks who labor behind the scenes to safeguard our means of communicating with the rest of the world often do so in anonymity. And they seem to like it that way.

What drives Cheryl Harris, manager of Sprint's Network Service Center, and Cal Gloss, director of network operations centers for WorldCom's Internet network, is not recognition. “It's personal,” says Gloss. “I've seen the Internet start from a very small industry and grow very quickly and at times become unwieldy. It's a personal challenge for me to build this into a world-class operations center.”

Gloss sagely recognizes that the Internet network he so fiercely protects is more than a bunch of circuits, and managing it is more than a job. “It's a service we are providing to the country and to society. I want to know that I had a part in what I think is a historical event almost as impressive as the introduction of the telephone back in the 1800s. I want to be able to say I contributed,” Gloss says.

Lest one thinks Gloss is thinking in terms of his legacy rather than his present duties, there is another thing that keeps him coming into the NOC every day: “I'm a glutton for punishment.”

As if six years in the Air Force fixing encryption systems wasn't punishment enough, Gloss now showers with his pager and complains about the reception. After six years with UUNet, starting as a senior NOC engineer who “had no idea what the Internet was,” Gloss now manages more than 200 technicians and is responsible for WorldCom's operations centers in Ashburn, Va.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Roswell, Ga.

WorldCom's 200 technicians seemingly have a bit of the glutton in them as well. “I have been told by some of my technicians that there is no place they would rather be than working in the NOC because they have their hands on every piece of network equipment the company owns,” Gloss says. “And they enjoy a challenge when it breaks.”

Goss and his team have faced many challenges during their careers, though perhaps none was bigger than that prompted by this month's terrorist attack. While damage to WorldCom's Internet network was minimal, Gloss faced new challenges as the news was heard in his Ashburn, Va., NOC, approximately five miles from Washington's Dulles Airport.

‘There may not always be a crisis, but the reason there isn't is because we have people [monitoring] that network.’ — Cheryl Harris Sprint

“It was more of a leadership challenge. During the initial stages of the event, it was very emotional. I had to make some decisions, which looking back could have been very significant decisions in my life,” Gloss says. “We had to optimize our ability to perform the job but also had to maximize the safety of our personnel. It was scary to stay on the job in this very large location.”

Harris prefers to keep the events of last week private, a reflection of how, like Gloss, she takes her job personally. And like Gloss, Harris has a military background. She spent seven years in the Navy before joining Sprint and working her way up through the operations department where she has spent the last 13 years.

Harris manages 167 people at the Kansas City Transport Control Center where she maintains Sprint's domestic transport network. She, too, is intimate with her pager, preferring to shop for pajamas with pockets in order to sleep with it.

And what keeps Harris coming to the control center every day?

“Excitement,” Harris says. “Working in a control center, there can be some degree of stress. And people who work in that environment are motivated by stress. Without that stress, they are not happy in their jobs.”

Excitement is not always the first thing that comes to mind upon one's first visit to an operations center. “People are usually in awe because they think of the telephone industry as Lily Tomlin patching your call into a switchboard,” Harris says.

And like the fireman and health care professionals they emulate, Harris' team is not always in emergency mode. “There may not always be a crisis, but the reason there isn't is because we have people [monitoring] that network, and if there is any degradation, we respond to it quickly before it becomes service-affecting,” Harris says.

But when there is trouble? “There is a lot of energy in myself and in the technicians. When we see alarms, we respond immediately. That's what makes us tick: crisis. We don't want crisis, but we are prepared for it,” Harris says.

And never before has her transport control center been more prepared than it was for what Harris considers her biggest challenge as a control center manager: Y2K. After preparing for nearly two years and pulling a 24-hour shift as the clock ticked past midnight at WorldCom centers around the world, nothing happened.

“I couldn't believe it. All that work not to see anything?” Harris says. While Y2K didn't feed Harris' or her group's thirst for excitement, it demonstrated that in times of crisis, people really do come together. “It was one time our sister and brother partners in the industry — other interexchange carriers and local exchange carriers — partnered as an industry,” Harris says.

Mostly, Harris and her people work in a different mode. “We have a team of dedicated [people whose] job is to concentrate on proactive activities,” Harris says.

Much of that activity is rooting out the cause of intermittent troubles before they become permanent. It is where people transcend the technology that permeates the operations center. As good as network management systems have become at identifying trouble and automatically restoring service, “technology will only work as well as it is designed if it is maintained,” Harris says.