|
 |
|
 |
Quick Facts
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company. Its subsidiaries and affiliates are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and around the world. With a powerful array of network resources that includes the nation's fastest mobile broadband network, AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed Internet and voice services. The company's suite of IP-based business communications services is one of the most advanced in the world.
Harnessing the Internal Communication Power of Employee Information
Throughout the telecommunications industry, internal communications cycles are being compressed as
companies expand through acquisitions. In this changing atmosphere, AT&T's operating departments
such as IT and human resources face new pressures to create common employee address books and
distribution lists. Streamlining and automating this process is key to cost-effectively managing operations
and deploying resources.
"Improving our employee communications and targeting communications to particular audiences has
been a long standing business objective," says Scot Steele, Manager of Network Services. "Our operating
departments are very busy, especially with all the mergers in our company. AT&T has always
had a complex environment: SBC alone had 11 cellular companies and we strive to find products that help
us improve internal communication. We now need to be able to generate on-the-fly distribution lists to
address immediate employee communication needs such as when Hurricane Hugo hit, we were able to
reach employees in the affected areas in a matter of minutes rather than days."
In the past, the AT&T IT and human resources departments managed over 400 distribution lists with
40,000 users at the local and corporate levels, only with a lot of help from 11 system analysts and
administrative staff doing data entry. As a result, data was unreliable and Trouble Tickets averaged 2,300
per month. The turnaround time to fulfill a request was an average of 3 to 10 days. Using the Imanami
solution, AT&T was able to reduce the amount of Trouble Tickets by 45% down to around 1,500 per
month.
"We had all this information, but it was too hard to extract from Peoplesoft applications and the data was
unreliable," says Douglas Kremer, Director of Employee Communications. "We needed to worry a lot about
producing employee lists for executives using information extracted from Peoplesoft, updating the
information on Excel spreadsheets, and incurring huge costs in manual labor for data entry. Overall, our
goal is to improve employee communications and reduce the costs at the same time: a challenge given
our complex and changing operations."
AT&T began looking for ways to make employee information more accessible. "Some of our most
skilled people are not necessarily experts with spreadsheets, nor should they be" says Timothy Jensen,
Messaging Architect. "We wanted to make it easy for our people to individually query the system for
things like distribution lists by state, business unit, job function,
Accurate & Standardized Distribution Lists in Hours, Not Days
Jensen says automation of distribution list creation is especially important due to the AT&T
Wireless merger. "My department was asked to create 34 temporary distribution lists which could
have had a huge impact on our workload. What could have taken days took a matter of 5 hours
and now we can focus on more strategic initiatives. The Imanami solutions work like a champ!"
AT&T has implemented Imanami's GroupID Automate and GroupID Synchronize solutions
system-wide for their AT&T branded operations and is currently focusing on the employee
address book and common email address functions. "Peoplesoft is our master record of employee
information and we also have an employee locator application which may be retired as we start to
use Imanami's GroupID Synchronize product as a provisioning application. GroupID Synchronize is
so easy to use compared to other Meta Directories: what beasts! With GroupID Synchronize, we
don't need as much professional service time, Zscript and other unwieldy products. GroupID
Synchronize is intuitive and turnkey. Without a doubt we will use Imanami's solutions to
synchronize AT&T Wireless directories."
Unifying human resource and IT operations- instead of having some information managed from
individual business units and others managed at the corporate level- will better target employee
groups, improve the use of employee information, and achieve significant cost savings, according
to Jensen.
Benefit to AT&T Wireless
As AT&T utilizes Imanami solutions across the country, the company will become increasingly
proactive in meeting employee communications requirements according to changing business
conditions.
"We are consistently impressed by the people at Imanami," Jensen says. "They understand
information and identity management, and they are committed to getting solutions live and
putting them to work for AT&T. We think we have found a partner who will keep us on the
leading edge of distribution list and identity management- and this is extraordinarily hard to do."
|
|
|
