VoIP Strategy

The client, a County Council, was faced with a major headache regarding their telephone service and bills. Surveys revealed customer dissatisfaction with the quality of access to services. As with most authorities, the preferred means of access was still by telephone and this had failed to keep pace with improvements in service delivery so their achievements in receiving an excellent CPA rating were diluted. MorganDoyle’s brief was to create a 5-year telephony strategy to deliver "best value", i.e. significant service improvement without major expenditure, but not necessarily at least cost.

For historical reasons their telecoms service had become fragmented, with management devolved to various departments resulting in three parallel, loosely coupled systems: a private network based upon an Ericsson MD110 switch, a Centrex VPN and numerous islands of PSTN access. In total these systems served approximately 8,500 internal users.

The first task was simply to make sense of what infrastructure and services they had and the usage that was made of them, i.e. to establish a complete service inventory for telephony. No mean feat as it involved collating numerous information sources, including internal directories, accounts ledgers, asset and property registers, service provider contracts and telco CDRs and then removing the inevitable discrepancies and inconsistencies to create a snapshot of the current situation. Evaluation of current usage, features and future requirements was performed via one-to-one meetings with major stakeholders and workshops with departmental users.

MorganDoyle proposed a strategy of phased migration to Voice over IP (VoIP). IP telephony has had a long gestation but now many organisations find it a solid and pragmatic solution to their business requirements. It allowed the Council to realize recent investment in a major network upgrade, essentially saving call costs by toll bypass and re-investing the savings to create a single seamlessly managed service with scope to support upcoming converged voice and data applications.

The final stage of the project was to translate the strategy into an ITT with concrete deliverables and a well defined migration time-table.