When ripping and replacing is a must, there can be a silver lining

No need to rip-and-replace – so goes the mantra. But when organizational change is forced upon you, as was the case with the Ontario Association of Community Care Access Centres (OACCAC), an organization can appear to be like StarTrek’s dreaded Borg – a cyborg race that lives to assimilate others in pursuit of its own perfection.The good news is that the OACCAC really is a force of good, and it has have made the most of a provincial mandate to reorganize 42 disparate access centres to match the province's 14 Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). “We were asked to undertake a provincial approach to common programs and policies, and one of them was telecom,” says Richard Huffman, telecom programs director for the OACCAC, in conversation with Telemanagement. “We went to RFP, and selected Allstream as a partner, and Mitel for the equipment. We’ve deployed VoIP in 12 of the 14 access centres.”According to Huffman, the benefits have all been about business transformation.“We’re dealing with multiple offices serving their communities independently,” he says. “With one communication infrastructure and network it allows us to operate as a single corporate entity.”For the OACCAC, the emphasis is on delivering a more consistent client experience. The VoIP system is designed so that case managers are more accessible and healthcare can be delivered in a more consistent and professional manner. From a technology perspective, this means a Mitel applications portfolio that includes unified messaging and mobility applications such as Mitel Mobile Extension, as well as the Mitel Teleworker and Your Assistant solutions. These technologies allow for teleworkers or mobile case managers to use soft phones for full IP-based transfer of voice, video, and data.You shall be assimilatedSounds amazing, but getting a job like this done can be like herding cats, and the OACCAC needed complete buy-in from the access centres.“We consulted with all 14 executive directors,” says Huffman. “Their leadership and guidance helped make it a success – I worked closely with the directors and with Allstream throughout the deployment. Our role is to be like the trusted advisor, but the directors could see that there are cost benefits to going with single vendor and to a centralized team for program management and technology design and validation.”Fortunately, a lot of CCACs were leasing their gear. Allstream also offers a buy-back program, thus easing some of the pain when the legacy equipment was removed and replaced with the Mitel solution. As Huffman points out, the “A” in CCAC is there to remind them that the organization is all about access, and that means allowing for some flexibility. As it stands, the enhanced contact centre capabilities have allowed some CCACs to go with centralized centres with manual or automatic routing to other centres for after-hours or overflow access, and other s to go with a hybrid approach that can reroute calls as needed. This can depend on demand, much of which is determined by circumstance – everything from a pandemic to extreme weather can affect volume, and in such circumstances the in-take agents may be at home.For Tom Jolly, vice president and general manager of unified communications for MTS Allstream, the important thing was to create a communications platform that allows the community care centres to transform the way they operate. “When you have health care workers who can connect with greater ease to different offices or a variety of remote locations,” he says “they are more productive, and it helps improve internal collaboration.”Resistance is futileIt should be noted that although the OACCAC went to RFP for this, the organization seems to have a unique combination of a conservative, relationship-based approach to business, and a forward looking, almost aggressive attitude toward technology. It is no surprise, for example, that they went with Allstream, and that it took their advice – Allstream was the partner that recommended the upgrade to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), Office Communicator 2007 and Exchange Unified Messaging. As a result, the OACCAC has become a reference account for Microsoft, itself a Mitel partner.That said, the OACCAC’s relationship of the holy trinity of Allstream as implementation partner/advisor, Microsoft as software provider, and Mitel as the provider of application-driven gear, seems to be working out well enough.“Phase one was about infrastructure deployment,” says Huffman, “and phase two is where we are looking at leveraging that infrastructure. This is about more than phone replacement – we want to be able to leverage the infrastructure to guarantee QoS, to integrate the VoIP platform with our OCS client, and to have a unified communications strategy that includes enhanced contact centre applications.”And the OACCAC and its partner haven’t lost sight of the real goal:“This not only leads to greater efficiency for the system,” says Jolly from Allstream, “but better health care for Ontario citizens."

When ripping and replacing is a must, there can be a silver lining

News | August 27, 2008

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