ATIS CEO: Universities asked to adapt telecom training

The telecom industry is aware of its changing job needs, and there is an effort underway to update university curriculums to better address the IT and Ethernet skills required going forward, according to Susan Miller, president and chief executive officer of ATIS, the organization that develops US telecom standards and business solutions around those standards.

In a wide-ranging interview, Miller discussed the current skills dilemma and a variety of other issues, including the impact of the economy on groups such as ATIS which depend on telecom company participation in their standards efforts.

As part of her ATIS work, Miller sat on the boards of the Education Committee of the American National Standards Institute until January of this year, and still sits on the board of the Institute for Telecom Learning at the University of Oklahoma – that have recognized the need for a different type of telecom training and are working to engage universities in providing it.

ANSI and the Institute for Telecom Learning "do, in fact, interface with the university community to make them aware of what standard needs are relative to this particular sector,” Miller said. “We actually sat down and penned requirements documents over the last two years that say, ‘This is what you need to be thinking about as you develop your curriculum.’”

Miller cautions that it may be too early to assess the impact of those requirements. Most ATIS members are addressing this by adding more IT/IP/Ethernet experts to their staff, she said.

“When I look across the around 700 experts we have access to in all of our work, there are a small handful who really stand out as understanding and embracing the new technologies – and boy, everyone wants to have access to them,” Miller said.  “They tend to bring large groups with them in learning and understanding what needs to be delivered in the future.”

“What I am seeing in our member companies is, in fact, there is a new body of experts with all this understanding and expertise just down the hall,” Miller said. “You walk from the old wireline group to the 50 new people who now understand service-oriented networks. There are some innovative minds in these companies. They are growing with the needs of the company in terms of delivering services.”

ATIS focus on SON
In recognition of the growing need for new skills, ATIS earlier this year convened a Service Oriented Networks Forum, Miller pointed out. The SON Forum “is looking at increasing infrastructure virtualization, blended partner capabilities – and the implications for business model as well as end users,” Miller said. “That work -- which is looking at IMS, Web 2.0 and SOA -- will bring a huge paradigm shift in communications status quo. This is a very complex area, but it will fundamentally change how industry infrastructure is built and leveraged. That work is original work – we did a very intense, long study – and when you looked across the landscape of everything people were doing from a standards perspective, we saw that this was not really being broached, particularly in the current environment of integrating network and IP. We felt we could bring real leadership to that area.”

The new forum has had “robust participation,” Miller said, and is drilling down into three specific areas: policy and data models; OSS/BSS and virtualization and service delivery creation and enablers.

“This is such a complex area, and we have to decide where to go first,” Miller said.  “That work will address the bold new world of opportunity relative to delivery of services and what networks are going to do.”

Economy not slowing ATIS work
Telecom industry companies, including service providers and equipment vendors, are not cutting back on their participation in ATIS committees and forums in light of the economy, Miller said, but the method of participation is changing.

“What changes to a great deal is them asking us to be innovative in the ways they can participate, so it’s not necessarily a falling away of membership, but the focus of what we do and the innovation we can bring into how we do it,” Miller said. “Last year, we had 175 face-to-face meetings, but we had 1100 virtual meetings. That is going to go up this year. The tools to support all of that are getting better. The best ones are not widely prolific, but they are getting better.”

So instead of paying for travel, ATIS members are using Live Meeting, Webex and other conferencing methods “and a lot of people’s patience to persist in consecutive days of focusing on the work,” Miller said. “We are going to be doing trials with social networking tools to evaluate how we might use those. We don’t know if those are better in the marketing/branding area or if we can actually make real usage of them in the development work.”

Even companies such as Nortel Networks, which is in bankruptcy filings, are still participating.

“Nortel is still at the table,” Miller said. “In fact, what is interesting about a company which is trying to reorganize and define its future is that they tend to be more attentive. It’s a venue at which they can advance their thinking and their wares. They are more active – we try to accommodate that. If a company is in bankruptcy, it doesn’t mean they are not operating; it doesn’t mean they are not contributing.”

Miller credits the ATIS focus on tying standards to business problems for keeping companies engaged. “The formula that makes ATIS deliver continued value to all of its members is the tight coupling of where the company is going from a business perspective to what they need on the technical level. That is absolutely core to us delivering value and them staying at the table to receive that value.”