The intelligent work force: Software-driven workflow management and computer-based work force training are helping OSS staffs to maintain peak performance

It is the best of times and the worst of times for network providers. The doors of competition now stand wide open, inviting carriers to enter on all fronts, from both a geographical and product standpoint. And while an open market concept may be a capitalist's dream, the day-to-day coordination of a contemporary telecommunications network can quickly become a nightmare for operation support staffs.

Take the case of a competitive local exchange carrier. To be truly competitive, the CLEC attracts customers with a slew of products, including local, long-distance, Internet and sometimes wireless service. With each additional service, there's another pricing element, and all these elements must be presented in one tidy bill that arrives at the customer's doorstep each month.

Behind the scenes, the carrier grapples with the horrendously intricate issues of billing, taxation, resale alliances and regulatory compliance. The complexities are further exasperated when designing private networks for corporations that have an existing system to which the carrier must interconnect. Before long, the underlying operation support database has grown to monstrous proportions. So has the need for a technically astute staff, which ideally would be versed in each relevant aspect of telecom.

Maintaining such intricate networks and retaining an educated work force are the trappings of being a successful network provider in today's market. To solve both quandaries, carriers are looking for answers at the desktop. What they're finding are computer-based solutions that increase the productivity of their highly skilled, much sought-after employees.

Hard questions, soft answers Among the most popular skills to incorporate in a computer-aided system are network design and pricing. The tangible facts, figures and algorithms that comprise these schemes lend themselves quite well to the logical world of the desktop. Designers can optimize a network and then quickly reflow it by changing any given variable in the system. The same is true for pricing. Bids may be written under terms of one pricing plan and then modified with the touch of a key.

These "soft" tools compute design variables in a fraction of the time needed for manual methods. They are also much more reliable and flexible in handling the myriad possibilities for network configurations.

"There are a lot of new services coming into the marketplace. Carriers have a lot of options, and it becomes incredibly difficult to deal with all these different scenarios and pricing plans. It's not uniform pricing," says Baris Dortok, president of Network Design and Analysis Corp.

"It is becoming more difficult for large networks to handle all these situations," he says. "Large corporations as well as carriers need tools to come up with ideal network configurations that will meet connectivity requirements and will give competitive, reliable network solutions to customers. Without a tool like that, designing networks becomes almost impossible-either they are overconfigured or they are not as reliable."

Toronto-based NDA specializes in computer-based tools for network design and pricing. Customers use the Autonet product family to optimize performance for tasks such as least-cost routing for a wide area network, order processing and bill reconciling, or inventory tracking.

NDA customers have access to an extensive database of tariff structures from network providers that is electronically updated twice a month. It's used to develop bids for carriers' own systems as well as to generate comparison quotes based on their competitors' tariffs.

Once the bids are written, they can be output in Windows documents or in an HTML report that can be sent over the Internet. For example, a corporate office can design a network pricing scheme, which a regional office might reconfigure to incorporate variables within its own market. When the bid is printed, the system maintains the graphics that wereinput by the home office but modifies them to reflect the needs of regional customers.

"We work with carriers to come up with precise pricing for them to give quotations so that their staff does not have to go in and make modifications," Dortok says. "It creates uniform pricing throughout the organization. The customers get timely, consistent, accurate information.

"This is a significant productivity improvement tool because of the inputs and outputs we have," Dortok explains.

For example, NDA interfaces with Microsoft Office products such as Excel and Word so that its users can input information and automatically receive detailed product pricing. "Whatever information they want in the spreadsheet, they can define it themselves," Dortok says.

As the number of services continues to increase, a growing demand for software tools will help carriers get their arms around their massive systems.

"I think the biggest hurdle is the variety of services, the variety of carriers and the changing regulations," Dortok says. "We have addressed this issue with the extensiveness of our tariff information and flexibility of our service definitions. But it is an issue that is constantly growing for our end users that don't have our type of products.

"In the future, carriers are going to feel more pressure with these constant changes in the marketplace to come up with more computer-aided design and pricing tools like ours," Dortok continues. "In the past, there was not as much concern about doing things in a more automated way. There were a variety of ways for providing this type of pricing and design solutions to customers, but they were not quite efficient. There will be more pressure to do things in more accurate, productive ways."

Teach your workers well Staffing for telecommunications is a mixed blessing. The industry's explosive growth over the last 10 years created tremendous need for technically adept professionals, which created a staffing boom. Unfortunately, the supply has not kept up with the demand, so filling positions with skilled workers is becoming more of a headache.

The huge consumer demand for services from on-line access to wireless connectivity has fueled the need for technical support personnel. As more companies began serving up these hot products, the pool of technicians who could support such sophisticated systems began to dwindle. And it's not just a concern in North America. The number of technical professionals is spreading thin around the globe as new ventures bring communications to every pocket of the world.

With today's shrinking work force, training and retaining qualified employees is more important than ever. But when you're battling to stay afloat in this hotly competitive industry, who has the time-not to mention the financial wherewithal-for ongoing training? For many corporations, the answer lies in computer-based training programs.

"There's been an awakening by corporate America. They've always understood the value of employees, but now they're willing to invest more in training than they did five years ago when there was a surplus of competent employees or contractors who could easily fill some of the spots," says Jim Cooper, president of Teletutor, headquartered in Portsmouth, N.H.

"These days, there's a lack of employees, potential employees and good consultants," he says. "So the only option a company has is to bring their own people up to speed. And of course, training is about the only way you're going to do that."

Cooper started Teletutor in 1985 to deliver comprehensive telecommunications training. At his previous job as a Tellabs operations training manager, he taught customers how to install and configure equipment. What he repeatedly found were students who had never learned the basics of telecommunications and, therefore, didn't understand the technology behind the products. That compelled him to start the company that today specializes in computer-based training for virtually every segment of the industry.

"What we are teaching are the concepts behind things," Cooper says. "Half the problem with telecommunications technology is in its language. And if you don't understand the language and you don't understand how things are applied and how they work, it is very difficult to understand when things don't go the way they're supposed to."

Teletutor's library of some 100 course topics is expected to double within the next 18 months. Courseware comes in many forms-from disks and CD-ROM to electronic downloads over the Internet and in real time through the virtual campus of its corporate parent UOL Publishing.

"From the very beginning, we've had a commitment to teaching both visually as well as through the written word," says Cooper. "We use a lot of animation and a sort of discovery method of learning where we ask people to figure things out. Our goal is to be able to involve the student in the material itself and not just present it."

The need for speed and flexibility in training drove the U.S. computer-based training market from $882 million in 1996 to a projected $1.3 billion in 1997, according to International Data Corp. In an industry that runs on a lean work force, time away from the job weighs heavily when considering training options.

"A lot of employees cannot take time away from their job to get training. They just can't leave," Cooper explains. "They're in critical positions, and they're expected to do a lot more these days. That's how important some of these employees are now. There are so few employees to go around, and some of them are so overburdened.

"With computer-based training, they don't have to leave the job. They can do it at the desktop in a half an hour or during lunch hours," Cooper continues. "You don't have to physically get on an airplane and go to a classroom somewhere and have the expenses associated with it. But even more than the expense is the time away from the job."

As sleek as desktop learning has become, it still has its limits. Some vendors tend to overwhelm the market by announcing fantastic new ways of presenting materials. Most of their clients, though, aren't equipped to accept some newfangled approaches.

"We really thought we would be doing much more multimedia, especially in the area of audio by now. But we tend not to be pioneers in terms of coming up with stuff that can't be used by the end user yet," Cooper explains. "The pioneers are the ones that end up face down with the arrows in the back.

"What we've been trying to do is respond to our customers' needs," he says. "The customers are the ones dictating what they want, and they have not shown us yet that they're willing to put speakers on the desktop in the workplace. In some cases, they are willing to use headsets, but it doesn't seem like it's a real high demand right now. Computer-based training works well enough."

Janet Silvey, Bell Atlantic's staff director of account management, agrees. The company uses computer-based training to augment its instructor-led programs that are conducted in numerous learning centers scattered across its 13-state region.

"What we're finding is that some of the vendors that I've dealt with have jumped ahead of us," says Silvey. "They are already looking at multimedia programs. We have not reached that stage yet, and I'm not sure that we will."

The company delivers computer-based training to the desktop so employees can access it during their down time.

"We have some area networks set up so that, with Teletutor or anything else, we load the courses onto [a local area network]," Silvey explains. "Then anybody in the company can access it through LotusNotes and download it to their computer."

In a company that is in the midst of one of the nation's largest mergers, Bell Atlantic employees find a link to their corporate identity through computer-based training .

"It is really mind-boggling how many people have accessed our computer-based training to learn more about the company," Silvey says. "They want to know more about telecommunications in general and about different areas of our business."

Whether it is delivered via the Internet or on a disk, in the end, knowledge about the industry may prove to be the most powerful and most enduring productivity tool.