INTEGRATION UNDER THE GUN

Under an FCC-mandated deadline to establish a DSL wholesale unit, Verizon Communications was left with just six months to integrate individual pieces of an OSS unit into a cohesive OSS whole. Because of the size of the task, the company teamed with systems integrator Accenture. And contrary to the sloth-like reputation of most Bell companies, Verizon opened the door to Verizon Advanced Data in just six months.

Talk to those who do systems integration for a living, and they'll say that with any project, deadlines are always looming.

During the first half of 2000, the pressure of a deadline must have been nearly crushing for a group of Verizon employees. As part of the company's Section 271 approval for New York, the FCC gave Verizon only six months to establish a separate DSL wholesale company.

The mandate left the carrier with a daunting task. The new company needed to find buildings, hire employees and establish new business processes. More significantly, it faced huge technical challenges. In such a short time frame, Verizon had to create a new, integrated OSS that worked with multiple legacy systems to manage a service that it was still learning how to sell and provision.

Recognizing the enormity of the task, Verizon decided it needed help in the form of a systems integrator. In this case, the carrier wanted to work with a company that understood its business and could help with a large-scale rollout.

“We were starting basically a new organization from scratch,” said Thomas Ross, vice president of communications products for Verizon Information Technologies. “We needed a systems integrator with an understanding of Verizon and its business processes and a national reach that could help us implement in different parts of the country at the same time.”

For Verizon, Accenture met those requirements. The company had completed other integration projects for Verizon and each was a large customer of the other, according to Michael Condon, partner with Accenture.

As part of the integration process, Accenture mainly dealt with establishing business processes for Verizon's new company and defining OSS procedural and functional requirements.

Although Verizon was on a tight schedule, the company wanted to build with its long-term goals in mind. According to Ross, Verizon created a next-generation OSS — a system characterized by plug-and-play modularity via common industry standards, the great advantage of which is easy deployment and implementation of new systems and services.

Such a system, he said, was chosen because it could handle Verizon's future plans, including national expansion of DSL and related services, high scalability and the ability to evolve into an automated ordering and provisioning processes.

Accenture's role in establishing this new OSS was mainly conceptual. It identified exactly what should happen when the Verizon subsidiary received a DSL order, what the systems should do, where the handoff from one system to another should occur and what situations the system should be able to handle.

Once these were established, the actual work of creating and integrating systems was left to Verizon employees. “We had the depth of developers that were already working in this area,” said Ross. “We knew that type of functionality very well and could build the product.”

One such system is Verizon's Activation Assignment Inventory System. AAIS, based on the company's narrowband provisioning system, is being used in the former GTE territories and as the platform for Verizon's nationwide DSL rollout. It is the central piece of its DSL provisioning process. It handles order management, equipment testing and provisioning, assignment and activation, and feeds information to the company's off-the-shelf DSL billing system.

Though Verizon workers actually built AAIS, Accenture was involved in testing the system because it defined the functionality of other systems that were being developed, Condon said.

Not all of the systems used by the new Verizon subsidiary were built from scratch, though. If there is an existing product that meets the company's needs, Ross said, Verizon prefers to save development time and buy an off-the-shelf system. For this project, in fact, many systems came from OSS vendors, including billing, services assurance, project management and engineering.

When it came to evaluating these systems, Accenture's role was much the same as during the system builds: The systems integrator established test scenarios and assisted with the actual testing.

In addition to evaluating and establishing OSS requirements, Accenture also was called to help with the more basic tasks involved in starting a business. According to Condon, the company helped defined what work centers needed to be created, found the necessary real estate, negotiated leases, determined employment qualifications for future employees and mapped out their daily responsibilities.

Given the short time frame, of course, all of these projects occurred simultaneously. As the July deadline approached, Accenture and Verizon entered the conversion period.

The conversion itself was a challenging task, involving backing up data, bringing new systems online, taking old ones offline, uploading data and more. To make the process run more smoothly, Condon put together a 2000-point checklist of what had to happen. Over several days, Verizon and Accenture completed the conversion and ramp-up of the new company. Ultimately, it took about 10 days with the Accenture and Verizon teams working 24/7 to make sure the conversion went smoothly, Condon said.

It's a relationship that's sure to continue, Condon said. “Verizon's obviously a big client of ours; we are a big customer of theirs. We even have some cases where we have teamed together to develop products and sell them to our combined enterprise customers.”