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4 Steps to Unified Communications
Villanova University's Stephen Fugale talks VoIP migration
11/1/2007
Step 1: Pull Together a Task Force and Compile the Long List
Fugale and his University Information Technologies (UNIT) team put together a task force made up of the heaviest telephony users on campus--admissions, athletics, the IT organization, the office of the chief financial officer--as well as representatives from each major college, nursing, engineering, business, and liberal arts.
They started with a peer school comparison to find out what other comparably sized campuses were doing. They also explored telephony use in the corporate world, locally and otherwise. From this, the team began to assemble its baseline requirements. At about the same time they had two companies, Vodis Partners (now The Presidio Corp.) and Commonwealth Communications, come in to do assessments of its campus network infrastructure and establish what needed to be changed to support VoIP.
Using Gartner "Magic Quadrant" research, they developed a list of vendors, value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers they were interested in exploring. They also brought in Fortune Consulting as an expert in telephony to help oversee the entire process. "Frankly, while widely publicized," said Fugale, "the technology of VoIP was not something we had hands-on experience with. We wanted to augment ourselves."
Step 2: Start Making a Short List from the Long One
Then began the company visits--involving a group of four to six people, including Fugale--to every company under consideration. They talked to the vendor's R&D people, saw demonstrations of the technology, met with senior management and integrators, answered questions about Villanova and, said Fugale, looked them "eye to eye to gauge their interest and desire to work with us [in] what we were trying to accomplish."
As the school compiled its roster of requirements, it constructed what Fugale called a "hierarchical decision model" with specific criteria. The vendor evaluation eventually consisted of six categories: technical architecture, total cost of ownership, VAR or integrator viability, implementation, training, and vendor viability. Each of those, in turn, consisted of four to eight more specific levels of criteria, a total of 40, each weighted to reflect priority. For example, under technical architecture, criteria included user requirements as mundane as caller ID and as sophisticated as the ability to support SIP (session initiated protocol) phones or to support wireless and mobility.
"Our goal was to try to quantify our selections as we did vendor evaluations," Fugale explained. Those 40 criteria drove the definition of hundreds of requirements that translated into a request for proposal (RFP). That was made available on Labor Day in 2006, he recalled, and responses were returned between September and December. The RFP went out to 11 sources; the school received 10 responses, including one opt-out and one managed service it rejected.
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