Challenges

When AT&T Canada, one of Canada's largest national telecommunication carrier, recognized the market needs for high value customer services to enterprise clients, they assembled a focused team to develop and launch a new division to offer proactive network management services. In merely five months, they went through development of new operation centers in Toronto, Calgary and Ottawa, integrated several management systems for their large-scale network, hired few dozen new staffs and assembled a new organization. Everything was done at a fanatic pace.

Approaching the summer of 2000, the official launch date of the new division was near and AT&T Canada had to get all the facilities and equipment ready for business. Among the various challenges, they have to train and prepare a significant number of new staffs, to mange complex network services, using a number of old and new systems, with new business processes that were still under development. They needed a tool that would allow information and knowledge be easily captured, organized and distributed. And they needed that fast.

Knowledge Management Solutions

While Webernetic Inc. was contracted by AT&T Canada for the system development work of the new customer service centers, they recognized that one of the critical success factor for the system deliverables is to have users well trained and informed on systems capabilities, business processes, operation procedures, as well as customer specific knowledge such as contracts and network design. Webernetic recommended to AT&T Canada to deploy a DocuShare server on an NT platform to serve as an on-line knowledge repository. After receiving the approval, a number of analysis sessions were then coordinated with the user community to establish the knowledge framework and knowledge flow (contributors and receivers). The DocuShare server was setup, its library structure, permission rights, user groups, and subscriptions were defined in accordance to the analysis results. Relevant user groups then took ownership of sections of the library, and they began populating to DocuShare loads of business and technical documents. These were all done with minimal system administrative resource.

From start to finish, AT&T Canada took less then four weeks to build a DocuShare site that they used to deliver training, and to serve as an on-line reference library. "Compared to collating and compiling large volume of paper based manuals with new and old materials, which is inherently inefficient and can easily become obsolete, DocuShare significantly reduced the time we would have taken to organize and deliver high-volume training. The fact that users can always return to the site for updated information makes it an indispensable tool for our operations." said Paul Sunderland, the Senior Director of Customer Services at AT&T Canada.

Trouble Management Solutions

In additional, Webernetic speerheaded the re-design of the Trouble Management System. The system was implemented in Peregine's Remedy back in 1995, which is lacking features required to support the new operations. Webernetic took the challenge to assess the operational needs, identify technology and operational gaps in current system. Subsequently Webernetic was contracted to architecte, manage and implemente the new design.

The new system was deployed on time, on budget, and have significantly improved the quality and effectiveness of the operation center in processing network incidents.

Summary

In the summer of 2000, AT&T Canada successfully launched the new operation centers with staffs fully trained on essential operational knowledge. They continue to use DocuShare as a knowledge management platform to capture, organize, and distribute information and knowledge.

Today, the DocuShare server has evolved to a full-scale knowledge library hosting essential operations and business documentation. It is being used like other common office tools as word processor and email applications. Plan is also made to deploy DocuShare onto the internet for web access, serving as an knowledge exchange environment between the customers and AT&T Canada's internal business groups.