Bell Canada Transforms Legacy Applications Into Sophisticated Business Intelligence Systems

In 1900, the Bell Telephone Company of Canada introduced the first central energy switchboard, or common battery, which eliminated the need for customers to generate the power to make a call by turning a crank on the telephone. That innovation in technology may seem quaint today, but at the time it was the ultimate in customer service. Not only did the new device speed the time to make a switchboard connection and thus alleviate customer frustration – it just might have cured a few aching arms.

While the technology at Bell Canada has changed tremendously in the last 100 years, the defining principle of the company remains unchanged: to provide stellar customer service. Today Bell Canada provides a full range of communications services to more than 8 million residential and business customers in Canada – including local and long-distance telephone service (both wireline and wireless), Internet access and high-speed data services, and satellite communications, among others. The company boasts 12.6 million telephone access lines and employs more than 39,000 people.

Bell Canada has adapted rapidly to meet changing business conditions, especially through improved information technology. Along the way, the company has picked up some crucial allies. "Information Builders has been a tremendous partner for us," says Bill Chadwick, Bell Canada's senior project manager for IT development. "With their help, we have completed many award-winning business applications, some of which have kept us in a highly competitive position during difficult times. Turning around a legacy telephone company quickly is not an easy task, and we needed the flexible tools and strong cooperation of a vendor such as Information Builders to pull it off."

Chadwick makes no bones about his favorite Information Builders product: the stalwart EDA* middleware. For him, the scope of the company's integration solution has been the key to success at Bell Canada. He cites especially the role it played in creating Bell Canada's strategic Change Management system, winner of both the Canadian Information Productivity Award and the prestigious Smithsonian Award for Innovative Use of Technology.

Well-Planned Migration

EDA's flexibility came to the fore in 1996, when Bell Canada designed a Change Management system to correlate information impacting the launch of a new fiber optic network. Of key concern were the diverse databases and communication protocols that made up the company's information-access system. "We needed to quickly deploy an information-access process that would automate the matching of circuits to customer accounts," Chadwick explains. "EDA allowed us to access the information in multiple databases to obtain a uniform view of the data."

Application development entailed loading EDA Server software on the company's MVS mainframe complex, replicating a large IMS database, testing links to DB2 databases, establishing a catalogue on the EDA Server, testing EDA/Compose software in various workstations and network environments, and writing Remote Procedure Calls to extract the circuit data. Queries were then written to correlate the various permutations of customer names to their appropriate Signature Service accounts. "It was an overwhelming success," Chadwick says. "Thanks to EDA, we had a pilot application up and running in six weeks."

Strategic Change

The Change Management application was strategic for Bell Canada, Chadwick maintains, protecting more than $1 billion in revenues with major accounts, and crucial in fending off intense competition. And with EDA as the integration engine driving the application, other benefits were quick to follow.

"One of the beauties of applications built with Information Builders products is that those applications are evergreen: you can continually add new wrinkles and new requirements to an existing system," Chadwick says. To prove his point, he cites an expansion of the Change Management system – an automated just-in-time facilities provisioning application that won for Bell Canada a Smithsonian Award for Innovative Use of Technology. Prior to launching this application, provisioning for the countless terminal facilities that fed out to homes and offices was maintained by providing an adequate margin of spare facilities across the network. "This was a very expensive way to ensure provisioning," he notes. "We had two options for streamlining the process: hire a large team of people, who would physically monitor terminals and report on problems, or build a software application to do the job for them."

Chadwick and his team once again turned to Information Builders. "We used EDA to interrogate the Facilities Access database in an old legacy system, then used FOCUS to give our clients intelligence about the condition of facilities all across the network," he says. "Our clients then use this intelligence to act proactively in replacing facilities." The result? A savings of 60,000 hours in administrative work. Users of this EDA application alone number 1,300 people.

Mapping for Success

This transformation of legacy data to business intelligence was only just beginning. More recently, the Change Management application was expanded to feed the matching of circuits to customer accounts into Bell Canada's Provincial Network Operations Center (PNCO). The Center monitors "threats" – possible disruptions of services – across the entire telephone network. These threats are displayed on large wall maps of the provinces.

With the Change Management information, the Center is able to correlate the data and identify changes to the network that might be causing threats. They can also interpret and prioritize legitimate threats, using criteria such as major accounts involved, major systems affected, whether there are bypass circuits, and so on.

The Change Management application has also been linked to the company's centralized 911 service, ensuring diversity management. "What this expansion of the application does is correlates any rearrangements of circuits that might compromise a fiber optic route reserved for 911 calls," Chadwick says. "We use EDA to monitor the circuits and analyze what fiber they're running on. Then we look for any correlations all along the 911 routes that might disrupt services. Other tools can do this in one cross-section, but EDA allows us to look at all the routes, from end to end."

EDA Everywhere

EDA has spawned a number of other significant achievements at Bell Canada as well. These include the correlation of Circuit and Facility database information to expedite recovery of facilities, saving the company millions of dollars; the linking of line installation tests produced by digital multiplex switching machines with facility databases, to pinpoint network weak spots; and the correlation of facility, demographic, and corporate information, to provide targeted marketing initiatives. All told, EDA handles 100,000 queries per week, according to Chadwick. Indeed, EDA accounts for a sizeable amount of the total data accessible at Bell Canada. "We have around two terabytes of data accessible through EDA," he says.

Another high-profile EDA-based application reduces the time required to provision high-speed Internet services – commonly called "Mega" services. Lack of adequate integration between the company's Service Orders processing and its engineering group had been causing unacceptable delays in provisioning these new orders. EDA was used to scan the Universal Service Order System (USSO) database for new orders, pick out the ones that were relevant to engineering, and pass them into the engineering process. "That way, engineering could start their hardware ordering process right away," Chadwick points out. "We're getting the order-to-installation interval down to one and a half days. It is a very effective system with tremendous benefits: low overhead, high availability, and rapid deployment."

Enter WebFOCUS

Many Information Builders products have been used to create these business systems, such as FOCUS for reporting and Resource Governor to monitor query activity. And now the company is using WebFOCUS to deploy several new pilot applications. "Using WebFOCUS allows us to get very rapid feedback, because we don't have to go out and equip hundreds of PCs with new software," Chadwick explains.

However, it is EDA's rapid development potential that rates Chadwick's highest praise. "We had the first version of the USSO linking application up and running in eight weeks, and clients were using it from day one," he concludes. "At Bell Canada, EDA is everywhere, underpinning a host of advanced business intelligence systems. Without the power of EDA integration, we would not be anywhere close to where we are today."

(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)