Insurance house Lloyd's of London has just adopted a Voice over
Internet Protocol system. Julia Vowler talks to the IT chief who
nursed users through the transition
Taking a punt at new technology is always a tough call for an IT
director to make but it can pay off. Chris Rawson, head of IT at
Lloyd's of London, recently oversaw a successful move to new
telephony technology, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
There were, he says, good business reasons for adopting VoIP. "The
main business driver was cost. VoIP is saving us more than £1m a
year over four years," he says.
The timing was right too. Lloyd's had just reached a breakpoint in
its existing contract for BT's Featurenet service, and was selling
part of its headquarters which contained a lot of telephony kit.
Moreover, Rawson felt that VoIP, which is only six or seven years
old, had gained sufficient industrial strength to merit
consideration.
It also proved much cheaper than the alternatives - renewing
Featurenet or building Lloyd's own, old-technology analogue PBX
network.
VoIP allows Lloyd's to use its existing Ethernet data
communications infrastructure for carrying digitised voice
telephony and, beyond the Ethernet, Rawson can now buy in telephony
PSDN bandwidth from several telecommunications companies at
competitive tariffs, to carry both voice and data on one
line.
"Voice telephony is now treated as a software service," says
Rawson.
His experience has thrown up seven golden rules for VoIP
implementation:
n Make sure that you have a compelling business case - Lloyd's
spent £1.4m on VoIP, but will save £4m in four years, predominantly
from reduced tariffs. "We were already buying in data comms from
different suppliers, so we've got the required negotiating skills,"
says Rawson.
n Ensure the VoIP architecture is well designed - "Telephones are
our lifeblood, we had to have full resilience and no operational
risk," says Rawson. "VoIP is not bleeding edge but it is leading
edge. We have five [software] call managers running so there's
minimal disruption if one fails, and we also run over two mirrored
sites, Lime Street and Chatham. We can handle 50,000 calls a day
from our 2,500 users."
There may be an impact on the desktop environment as well. VoIP
requires a certain base level of desktop, and Lloyd's needed to
upgrade a few of its PCs, though the bulk were already at the
Windows 98 baseline.
n Plan the project well - "You are stripping out the entire
telephony structure, you must plan very carefully," says Rawson.
"It would have been nice to have had more time, but we had
immovable deadlines with the BT contract ending and the pressure to
move buildings."
n Ensure you have good VoIP suppliers and implementors. "We got
Cisco's original VoIP developers - it was definitely their A-team.
BT Syntegra was likewise extremely positive about doing the
integration," says Rawson.
n Avoid a "big bang" implementation. Roll out incrementally - as
well as the usual test-beds, VoIP was introduced first at the
Chatham site, before going online in the London building. "This is
a large, complex implementation," Rawson warns. "You must take it
seriously."
The project started in August, and the first phase of
implementation was in November. "It was fully rolled out by the end
of the year," says Rawson. At its peak he employed about 30
in-house staff on the project, as well as integrators from BT
Syntegra and staff from Cisco.
n Make sure you have enough training and appropriate follow-up
support. Phones are a way of life for office workers, and VoIP
makes changes to a very familiar function. The new VoIP phones have
a different look and feel, more like a mobile phone. "They are
slightly different from traditional phones so they take a little
getting used to," Rawson says.
They also interact closely with the desktop PC, for example by
alerting on screen the arrival of voicemail and accessing phone
directories.
"We were asking our customers to take on a different look and feel,
different functions, a different way of using phones - so we did a
lot of training and hand-holding early on," says Rawson.
After implementation he also ensured he had a team ready to be
deployed to sort out any teething troubles rapidly, such as
refining and tailoring local configurations.
Although Rawson was careful to try to give his customers a "like
for like" swap as much as possible when moving from traditional
telephony to VoIP, he now finds that users are keen to explore the
new possibilities the technology allows.
"We're getting calls from them asking, 'Can I do this? Can I do
that?' and, 'What can we do next with this?'," he says. "But we are
not going to rush into the next implementation phase, we're going
to gather more [information about their] requirements from
customers first."
Possible new functionality includes, for example, voice recognition
by way of voice-to-text conversion for on-screen voicemails.
"We're looking at a whole raft of different things, such as moving
to the local administration of telephony configuration, rather than
central administration, whereby underwriters can change their call
manager directly themselves, to do things like fast dialling,"
Rawson says.
One thing that will not be disappearing off desks quite yet,
however, is phones - even though VoIP can work perfectly well
through PC speakers. "In an open office it's more discrete to use
handsets," he says.
Especially when the deals are as big as they are at Lloyd's.