NASCIO 2013 Award Submission. PennConnect Unified Communications Project (IP Telephony, Unified Communications and Collaboration)

Transcription

1 NASCIO 2013 Award Submission PennConnect Unified Communications Project (IP Telephony, Unified Communications and Collaboration) Information Communications Technology (ICT) Innovations Lanny Black Chief Technology Officer Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Office of Administration Office for Information Technology 1 Technology Park Harrisburg, PA lanblack@pa.gov Project Initiation: September 2011 Project Completion: December 2012 Page 1 of 6

2 Executive Summary The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Office of Administration, Office for Information Technology (OA/OIT) is chartered with providing enterprise telecommunications services, including wide area networking, Internet, voice and video, and teleconferencing services to the commonwealth s agencies throughout the state. In 2009, the commonwealth entered into a contract with a new telecommunications provider, Verizon, and between 2009 and 2012, the commonwealth s entire voice and data network was transitioned to the new provider. During the transition, it became obvious the aged technology that existed within the commonwealth posed a daunting challenge. State government had been relying on ISDN technology, which had become increasingly difficult to support and maintain. Approximately 98 percent of the commonwealth s ISDN equipment was over 10 years old (well past normal refresh cycles), only one vendor still provided an ISDN telephone set and service providers were having difficulties supporting this obsolete technology. When the administration of Governor Tom Corbett took office in January of 2011, the commonwealth was at a crossroads with regard to its voice strategy; continue with ISDN or pursue a more modern technology that would meet both current and future business needs. Any decision had to be made in the context of limited budgetary resources and a newly elected governor committed to not raising taxes. In 2011, the commonwealth embarked on a major upgrade of its enterprise telecommunications infrastructure. The commonwealth worked with its telecommunications partner, Verizon, to implement Internet protocol telephony (IPT) unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solution for 40,000 employees in over 300 work locations statewide. In addition to upgrading to a mature and reliable VoIP technology platform, the commonwealth also sought to maintain or reduce costs, increase efficiencies and provide greater workplace flexibility for employees. The implementation was not without its challenges. The commonwealth had to evaluate and adjust each designated location for proper bandwidth, quality of service parameters, and power over ethernet capabilities. The commonwealth factored the costs of these adjustments into the business plan on a location-by-location basis. Each site was evaluated for the type and criticality of the operations and the location configuration with long distance savings as part of the overall business case. This initiative has resulted in employee tools that included new telephones, enhanced communications and productivity tools, online meeting and collaboration software, instant messaging, presence, one-number-service and voic integration with . As part of the transition, the commonwealth reviewed its telephone line use and removed unused or underutilized telephone lines. In addition to remaining budget neutral, the solution supports mobility, bring your own device (BYOD), telework and continuity of operations. Best of all, the commonwealth was able to work collaboratively with its business partner to implement the solution under its existing contract in a cost effective and highly reliable manner. Page 2 of 6

3 Business Problem and Solution Description When Governor Tom Corbett took office in January of 2011, the new administration recognized that the state s telecommunications needed a major technology upgrade. At that time, the commonwealth was in the course of implementing a new telecommunications vendor and 98% of the telephony infrastructure was more than 10 years old and obsolete. The administration recognized that although technology modernization drivers were compellingly urgent, a balance of resiliency, security and budgetary adherence also must be maintained. That spring, state officials began to explore options with their telecommunications provider to determine how unified communications could assist with their goals for reliability, reduction in travel costs and third-party collaboration service costs through the utilization of a web collaboration tool, coordination of mobility and BYOD, teleworking and continuity of operations. The commonwealth s requirements demanded that the system be fully redundant, reliable, E911 compliant, fully functional, easily deployed and easily supported with limited staff, while remaining overall budget neutral relative to the incumbent technologies. The Office of Administration, Office for Information Technology (OA/OIT) led an exhaustive, solution and vendor agnostic evaluation of platforms, from a portfolio and enterprise architecture perspective. Based on its findings, OA/OIT selected the IPT UCC solution most suited for the immediate and long-term needs of the commonwealth. Upon completion of the evaluation process, OA/OIT finalized a telecommunications modernization strategy and subsequently developed and deployed an enterprise-grade IPT and UCC platform using the Siemens OpenScape Voice solution, one of a few Gartner Magic Quadrant solutions available for Enterprise IPT, provided and managed by Verizon. With the selection of an IPT and UCC platform, the commonwealth sought to create a foundation for the future, while also repurposing, reutilizing and adapting existing and new investments. The commonwealth branded the new IPT solution and technology as PennConnect and began the deployment. The system design conforms to the commonwealth s desire for standards-based open architecture, scalability, mobility and the ability to meet the needs of the next generation constituency. To meet the program requirements, the commonwealth implemented: The solution in an active-active geo-redundant architecture with one-half of the system at each of two commonwealth buildings over three miles apart from each other. Each of these locations has separate public switched telephone network and wide area network connections allowing for full diversity and survivability. One of four possible configurations from full redundancy and survivability to standalone in 310 remote locations based on the number of users and criticality of the location activities. The commonwealth used a cost versus risk analysis to determine the appropriate configuration. Page 3 of 6

4 Verizon partnered with RedSky Technologies, Inc. to provide a fully functional E911 solution throughout the state with a seamless user experience. A fully managed service arrangement from Verizon, which includes: Network operations center based monitoring of the core platform Full service desk support Dedicated personnel at the core sites Break / fix support for core and network edge equipment Back up and restoration capability for all supported devices and applications Software assurance support to stay current Change, release and patch management Budget neutrality through the reduction of a collaboration subscription with another provider, reduction of long distance charges, and elimination of over 5,000 telephone lines, all while improving functionality for the users. From an end-user perspective, the commonwealth defined two categories of user profiles: basic and advanced. Basic users received the following: One-number-service allowing a user to determine where their office telephone number will ring. They can select their office telephone set, their cell phone, an alternate office or conference room or even their home telephone in the event they need to work remotely. Conference calling allowing a user to establish an initiated or meet-me conference call, thus reducing the reliance on a service provider and reducing expenses for conference calls. These conferences are self-administered through a web page that allows the user to establish the calls as needed without incurring any additional costs or delays. Presence allowing a user to see the status of a coworker before making that telephone call. This allows the user to be more efficient by seeing if the person is on a call, in a meeting or not logged in. Voice over IP (VoIP) allowing for the reduction of traditional telephone lines by using the commonwealth s data network, and reducing long distance costs. Voic integration with Microsoft Exchange to give users more options to manage their voic s. Instant messaging allowing for a text type of communications between users, reducing the number of telephone calls and voic s for those quick and short conversations. E911 was a critical consideration in selecting an IPT solution and was enabled on every IPT phone at every location allowing for the proper safety and security of the commonwealth s employees and visitors at any of the IPT locations around the state. Page 4 of 6

5 Each agency selected those with the need to be configured as an advanced user, who received the above basic services, plus: Siemens Fusion where the IPT features are integrated with the user s Outlook software. This gives the users the ability for their calendar to update their presence automatically and allows their address book to interact with the VoIP function, enabling a user to call another user directly from the Outlook address book. Web collaboration allows users to share their computer screen with one or more remote people, reducing the need for travel for face-to-face meetings when working on a document or sharing information such as a PowerPoint presentation and a reduction in a collaboration subscription service. Mobility allows the functionality of the IPT phone via a smartphone app. This includes using instant messaging, conference administration and presence from any location using this app. The commonwealth initially sized the system to support 57,000 users, of which 35,000 were anticipated as advanced. To date, the commonwealth has implemented over 40,000 IPT users across 310 buildings, including over 12,000 users with the advanced feature set. Implementing PennConnect was accomplished with the hard work and dedication of many people at Verizon, Siemens, OA/OIT and the agencies. This implementation required many activities to be completed in the proper sequence at the proper time with hundreds of these activities occurring simultaneously. Implementing the solution provided many challenges such as: User configurations reviewing and redesigning over 40,000 telephone user configurations to the new technology. Bandwidth we evaluated (and adjusted if needed) each location s data bandwidth. QOS we adjusted every location s WAN, LAN, and the commonwealth s backbone network (COPANET) to enable quality-of-service (QOS) to assure the VoIP traffic was given the necessary priority. POE each location was evaluated for the availability of power over ethernet (POE) on the local data switches. If not already available at the location, a business case was created to evaluate the viability of adding POE versus installing a power brick under the user s desk. User Training we provided instructor-led, train-the-trainer and classroom-based training to every user. We provided roaming trainers to tour the location for a few days after each transition to make sure everyone was properly supported. The PennConnect implementation aligns with four of the ten NASCIO 2013 Priority Strategies, Management Processes and Solution CIO priorities. Page 5 of 6

6 4. Mobile Services / Mobility: by implementing a smartphone app enabling the IPT feature set on mobile devices. 5. Budget and Cost Control: by implementing a new technology to a large portion of the commonwealth with no budget impact. 8. Legacy Modernization: through upgrading the commonwealth s ISDN telephony to IPT for over 40,000 users. 10. Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity: implementation of one-number-service allows users to redirect their telephone numbers to any location during a continuity event. In addition, PennConnect also aligns with the 8. Networking NASCIO 2013 Priority Technologies, Applications and Tools CIO priority through the implementation of unified communications to over 40,000 commonwealth users. Significance This project demonstrated vision, leadership and fiscal responsibility by achieving technology modernization objectives while avoiding additional overall costs and maximizing the value of existing investments. Not only did the project meet defined objectives, it has enabled the agencies and their personnel to re-think how constituent services can be provided or enhanced. By establishing the foundation for the future, OA/OIT has established itself among its state contemporaries as a trailblazer in government by establishing the first statewide IPT/VoIP implementation in the United States versus establishing building or metro area IPT systems. The commonwealth s strategic ability to combine technology investment with vision has resulted in a fiscally responsible, technically robust and future-oriented infrastructure that provides immediate benefit to agencies, employees and constituents alike. Benefit of the Project With the implementation of PennConnect, the commonwealth was able to implement a best in breed IPT technology to a large percentage of the commonwealth s users without increasing costs to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth enhanced communication and end-user efficiency with presence, instant messaging and interfacing voic with , and, the commonwealth enhanced its continuity of government posture with the survivability of an active-active geo-redundant architecture, and one-number-service, while it has laid the foundation for the emerging Bring Your Own Device trends. The commonwealth met its goals with an existing telecommunications partner, using an existing contract while maintaining budget neutrality for the commonwealth. Page 6 of 6