Building on Voice

Some systems offer structural points of entry. Recently Bruce Elkington, CIO of Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Wash., began thinking about the expense of installing conventional telephony in a building Overlake was planning to erect. VoIP seemed a logical alternative, so Elkington looked for a controllable installation that would give him some experience with the new technology. At one point he heard that the nurses on the general surgical unit were looking for cordless phones to supplement the unit’s noisy and inefficient paging system. Elkington knew a wireless data network was already available (and used to serve the data devices carried by clinicians making their rounds), so he decided to take advantage of it to carry wireless VoIP.

His experience reinforces the points made by other VoIP implementers: 1. Network provisioning and configuration requires lots and lots of fine tuning; 2. Installation partners and contractors seldom know as much as they think they do; and 3. Once the system is working, it works very well indeed. "It just took a few days before everyone said, We want one of those things too," he says. Today Elkington is planning an expansion to 150 VoIP phones and is quietly confident that he is going to save a lot of money for his employer when the new building goes up without need for telephone cable. But he strongly endorses the strategy of defining an "educational" VoIP project before jumping into a major makeover. "If you don’t find a way to get comfortable with the technology first, you’re going to end up with a tin cup," is how he puts it.

These examples illustrate ways to design an incremental strategy: smaller versus larger offices, peripheral versus central enterprise functions, IS versus the rest of the company, WAN versus LAN (or vice versa), limiting the number of initial users, picking the offices with the oldest equipment or by capitalizing on a preexisting hardware base.

The particular strategy matters less than having one. The reason Steven Stam was able to work so fast that September, for instance, was that he already had run a VoIP project for months?in his case, a system that ran off the department LAN was distributed to headquarters but ran parallel and redundant to the PSTN system. People could use it as they pleased. And as they drifted on to the system, Stam was able to cut his teeth on VoIP.

Stam launched his experiment because of trends in the underlying economics. "I could see that prices kept coming down on the data side and not coming down on the telecom side," he says. But because he had done so, he was ready when his world changed in the most unexpected way. It’s a useful lesson in this era, when the world might change as much for any of us at any time.