Realising the benefits of a merged operation

CXO speaks to Ken Hamilton, Executive Director of International IT, Verizon Business.

One of the biggest challenges for global organisations today is maximising the potential of IT infrastructures in support of business operations. For widely dispersed multinationals operating across multiple borders and time zones, this is a challenge. Ensuring that business critical information can be shared on demand is crucial to driving business forwards, but it can be a complex process to ensure that account teams based in different locations and time zones can communicate efficiently and effectively.

The intricacies of integrating business processes and operations to ensure a seamless transition to a new business is not for the faint-hearted, particularly as it often takes place in the full glare of the media spotlight. The eagle eyes of shareholders, too, are often on the executives tasked with the integration. To realise the full benefits of a merger or acquisition, the newly formed business must be able to realise the potential of its shared assets quickly. Speed of operational integration becomes another – and sometimes primary – driver for business success. Additionally, establishing a future-proof IT infrastructure that will meet the expectations of internal and external audiences, as well as support business ambitions today and tomorrow, is a key day-to-day objective.

Ken Hamilton, Executive Director of International IT, Verizon Business, explains how he is working to meet customer, shareholder and employee expectations by balancing the need for swift integration with the integration of a robust, future-proof infrastructure.

CXO. Who is Verizon Business?
KH. Verizon Business is one of three business units of Verizon Communications, Inc. It has offices in 75 countries on six continents and 32,000 employees. Verizon Business provides mission-critical communications services to businesses and governments worldwide, including most of the Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. It opened its doors for business in January 2006 following the merger between MCI and Verizon Communications Inc. The other two Verizon Communications business units are Verizon Telecom and Verizon Wireless.

CXO. What type of customers does Verizon Business serve?
KH. Verizon Business operates in more than 75 countries worldwide, servicing enterprises and multinational customers across countries, continents and time zones. We work from experience. Our staff relies on the company’s infrastructure and operations to communicate seamlessly around the globe to service our customers. We therefore treat our ‘internal customers’ – our staff – as we do customers in the external world. In this sense, our organisation is really a ‘poster child’ for its own services and systems. The drive to provide excellent customer service, both internal and external, is at the centre of our operational integrity.

CXO. How has Verizon Business approached establishing an effective IT infrastructure?
KH. The IT strategy for Verizon Business has involved the retention of systems from both the former MCI and Verizon Enterprise Solutions Group while decommissioning duplicates. In essence, we have chosen to bridge, rather than merge, our two sets of infrastructure wherever possible. The key here is that the merger is designed to build on the strengths of both Verizon Communications and MCI.

CXO. What timescales did you operate under?
KH. The company set a 10-week deadline for completing 32 merger-related IT initiatives before its official market launch. These included merging sales-force automation systems, joining customer hierarchies, providing access to all users to systems from the former MCI and Verizon, rebranding our portals, unifying payroll, setting up financial reporting to corporate officers, and interlinking our intranet, e-mail and instant messaging systems. These 32 initiatives were completed in the first 100 days to create an integrated business environment for both our customers and internal operations.

CXO. What types of systems are we talking about?
KH. The telecom industry depends on an array of systems for sales-force automation, pricing, order entry, billing and more. To bridge two separate infrastructures, we have generated different initiatives:

• For customers, we developed the Verizon Business Customer Centre, a new portal that gives then control over the level of account and service management they want, including an ordering service and online payments. We also created portals where customers can bond their management applications directly with our systems to manage their network needs.
• For internal audiences, we created an internal information portal to help staff find product descriptions, the right systems for servicing customers and customer information. We then developed infrastructure to bridge the two sides, enabling former MCI employees to access former Verizon Enterprise Solutions Group systems and vice versa.
• In terms of products, we launched a suite of end-to-end communications and managed services that combine the strengths of product portfolios developed by the Verizon Enterprise Solutions Group and MCI. The resulting product set includes data and IP networking, managed services for local and wide area networks, voice applications, hosted IT services and customer premises equipment.

CXO, How did the new company ensure that data from both sides could be processed effectively across the organisation?
KH. In many cases, we simply collapsed similar applications into one, which became a data migration effort. When we need to create new connections between applications, we use a web services approach to drive a common interface format.

CXO. What about the bridging infrastructure – what was your approach to building this?
KH. Our systems are organised around a service-oriented architecture and web services environment. This gives us a logical way to form a bridge between the former MCI and former Verizon ESG systems as well as other Verizon units, customers and suppliers. The main elements of this infrastructure are an enterprise service bus for persistent transactions across systems, a developer workbench that supports publication/subscription of services and run-time monitoring of transaction volumes and response times.

CXO. How did you create synergy?
KH. Verizon Business IT launched the Synergy Program to take the best of Verizon and MCI and make a marriage of both, under the global leadership of the CIO, Judy Spitz. She took overall responsibility for program development, implementation and evaluation, working with the heads of each of the business units (network operations, marketing, sales and service, HR and finance). Judy and the team evaluated the cost/benefits of the Synergy Program with the CFO and kept open communications in place to discuss the structure of the new IT organisation Verizon Business was putting together.

The Synergy Program focused on realising the benefits of the combined system through automation and flow through of business processes to create operational efficiency. We evaluated if there was any duplication of effort across many areas of the business, including systems, system architecture and operations. By looking at business operations – both customer facing and internal – and using efficiency as our goal, we were able to make decisions that kept the customer as our first priority while contributing to the financial objectives set by the merger.

CXO. Has the merger had any impact on customers?
KH. We were always very mindful of putting customers first throughout the merger process. In particular, we were keen in our efforts not to disrupt the customer experience. We believe our success in achieving this objective is demonstrated by the fact that most of our customers, from both sides of the pre-merger fence, are still working with us.

We believe this was made possible by integrating the various different areas of our business – IT, networking, sales and product management – simultaneously. It made the challenge all the more exciting, but it’s meant we have been able to ensure that customer service has remained streamlined and consistent throughout implementation.

CXO. How are your internal customers responding?
KH. A key consideration for us was to ensure that all employees felt part of a new company as quickly as possible. Already, we are seeing the benefits of this approach. Employees are bringing a level of enthusiasm and energy to our operations that help us to support business objectives. Our primary objective in merging the operations was to provide customers with a better service experience – and our employees are key to achieving that.

CXO. What’s next for Verizon Business?
KH. We are continuing to work on streamlining other areas of the business as we move forwards. However, our key objective is to build on the strengths of the new combined organisation and ensure we can provide the service, products and solutions that will help our customers’ business to grow today and in the future.

In that sense, our strategy is to build on our IT success and keep our internal and external audiences’ requirements at the forefront of our minds.

We believe that by doing what we do best, our customers can do what they do best for their customers. Everyone working in the Verizon Business International IT organisation is dedicated to putting the customer first.