Quelle: CIO, Asia
The key criterion that enterprises have traditionally used to evaluate and decide the types of information and communications technology (ICT) equipment and services they need is the near- to medium-term ROI. However, with changes in business practices that the Internet has ushered in, enterprises have had to start thinking more creatively. Given that many enterprises have allowed their partners, suppliers and customers to plug into parts of their IT infrastructure, the importance of putting in solutions that ensure uninterrupted flows of information from one entity to the other, has become critical. This means enterprises now have to think of solutions that ensure business continuity as well. Furthermore, the continually tightening noose of competition has been nudging companies to think more about solutions that enhance customer satisfaction, instead of focusing purely on the near- to medium-term ROI.
Rescue Team
The extremes in climate, its isolation and sparse population made it fertile ground on which the imperial Russian government, and the Soviet regime that followed, spawned a network of penal colonies. The penal system was dismantled after the collapse of communism.
The island of Sakhalin, off the eastern coast of mainland Russia, however, has not fallen into a state of abandonment. It has found anew usefulness: huge reserves of oil have been discovered.
Two international consortia are drilling for oil in offshore fields close to Sakhalin's northeast coast. This means that there are a lot of expatriate workers in Sakhalin, many with families, who without doubt would have asked for the assurance that they would enjoy relatively easy access to a high-level of health care and medical support, as a condition for accepting to work here.
This is why the expertise of International SOS Pte. Ltd. has been tapped. It is the world's largest medical-assistance company and provider of remote-location medical services. International SOS employs 3,000 people in 66 countries - a third of whom are medical professionals - manning its alarm centres (call centres staffed with medically-trained professionals), offices, clinics and remote-site medical centres. Its clients comprise multinational companies, insurers and premium-level credit card holders.
In response to the needs of the two consortia, International SOS has set up a 65-member medical centre at Yuzhno, which is about 700 km south of the offshore fields. It also operates a network of smaller medical teams closer to the oil fields and on several of the offshore platforms. All this means that the network has had to be fitted with a communications infrastructure that assures high-level connectivity, to ensure that evacuations and emergencies are managed efficiently.
Always alert
A recent accident at one of these platforms demonstrates how this high-level connectivity was the critical factor that led to the rapid evacuation of an injured employee. An American expatriate suffered a crushed foot at this platform. A Russian doctor on duty immediately reported the accident to the International SOS medical centre at Yuzhno. This centre immediately alerted Singapore, the designated alarm centre for Yuzhno. Singapore, in turn, alerted the Tokyo alarm centre, to arrange for an air ambulance, translator and hospital admission in Japan. Tokyo also alerted the alarm centre in Philadelphia, U.S., so that the injured person's family was informed. The Russian doctor, in the meantime, stabilised this patient, working in tandem with doctors in Yuzhno via satellite telephone. The patient was airlifted by helicopter to the nearest airfield on Sakhalin, where he was evacuated by fixed-wing aircraft to Yuzhno. International SOS's doctors attended to him at Yuzhno, aboard another aircraft that had been chartered to fly him on to Sapporo, Japan, for hospitalisation. It took 12 hours to complete the transfer to the hospital from the moment the accident occurred.
International SOS has tapped on the expertise of communications solution provider Nortel Networks, Inc., to develop this high-level connectivity. "Nortel has provided us the technology and capability to maintain and manage the complex call centre environment we have," says Ian Baker, CIO, International SOS.
International SOS has installed Nortel's Symposium call centre suite of solutions at nine of its 26 alarm centres and it intends to install another four systems this year. "This solution also enables us to analyse our customer-response performance and generate metrics on call centre performance."
One other Nortel product that International SOS uses at its alarm centres is the Meridian PBX. It has call centre functionality built into it, which means that, should the primary call centre server(s)for some reason shut down, the Meridian switch will instantly take control of this function.
Serving customers
"We are assessed [by our clients] on the basis of how we actually respond to our callers, how we manage the cases, and how we follow through to meet their expectations," says Baker.
Say, for example, a Korean-speaking client wakes up in his hotel room in Yangon, Myanmar, feeling unwell. He hardly speaks English. But he nevertheless telephones the local alarm centre. International SOS's agents in total speak 70 languages across its global network. If this centre does not have a Korean-speaking person on duty, the agent will route the call to an alarm centre in Korea or any centre where at a Korean-speaking medical professional - nurse or paramedic - is on duty. The agent has ways of identifying the caller or the company he/she works for, thus knowing that this person is probably Korean.
Say, in the opinion of the Korean-speaking professional, the caller's condition is serious. He will route the call to the most suitably-qualified Korean-speaking doctor in the International SOS team. Now, say, this doctor decides to evacuate the caller to the nearest international-standard hospital, which, in this instance, is in Bangkok, Thailand. The Bangkok alarm centre will now be instantly activated. This doctor also wants his patient to be evacuated by air ambulance. But the nearest available air ambulance is in Singapore. So, now, the Singapore alarm centre is activated. All these alerts and activations mean that each of the alarm centres have to be aware of what the other is doing. And all this is possible because International SOS's information and communications technology network is tightly integrated and connected. "The alarm centres are the core component of our business," Baker explains. "We're ICT-focused, rather than just IT-focused," he adds.
The three pillars
"We have implemented three critical business applications into our alarm centres," Baker says. This comprises a CRM solution, an application that helps International SOS staff to quickly formulate a response to a client's problem or query, and a structured database. "Our CRM deployment is built around an Onyx solution." This application contains information on International SOS's entire membership base. "This solution helps us determine a caller's eligibility, the service level that a caller is entitled to, how this service is to be provided, and so on."
International SOS members each receive a membership card, on which the phone numbers of all the alarm centres and the holder's membership number are printed. This number enables an agent to identify the organisation to which a caller belongs. With this number, an agent is also able to extract information he needs about the caller, from the CRM system. For some clients, International SOS provides dedicated inbound phone numbers to selected alarm centres. This enables an alarm centre agent to instantly identify the organisation to which the caller belongs. "We have bolted in-house applications - membership, billing, etc. - onto this Onyx solution. This CRM solution is integrated into our central application, the CASE management system(see below), which has been developed in-house as well."
The CASE application captures information that the alarm centre needs to mobilise the necessary resources to effectively respond to a caller's request or problem. This information comprises answers to the following questions: Who is the agent speaking with? What were the circumstances? Where did it happen? When did it happen?
The third application is called the Service Provider Information Network (SPIN), which is a structured database. "We have the details of about 22,000 medical and related service providers worldwide," says Baker. This covers general practitioners, specialists, dentists, ambulance services, hospitals and so on. An agent can search and identify the right type of service provider using all manner of search criteria.
There is, in fact, a fourth application as well, that underpins the above three applications. This is e-mail. It is especially useful in handling cases that involve several alarm centres, as illustrated in the hypothetical example of the Korean executive in Myanmar. "Our e-mail infrastructure is built around a network of 32 exchange servers," says Baker.
As International SOS is in a business where even a few seconds of downtime can be catastrophic, it has had to engineer several layers of resilience into its ICT infrastructure. For example, "all our telecom switches are battery-backed," says Baker. The IT infrastructure is backed up by several sources of power supply and multiple CPUs. It has built-in resilience from a service point-of-view as well. "We can effectively switch from one alarm centre to another, should there be a physical calamity at one of them. So, for example, Singapore can backup Hong Kong, and Sydney can do the same for Auckland."
On the horizon
International SOS has also been thinking about collaborating with Nortel in implementing a VoIP solution. This is because its investments in the Symposium and Meridian solutions have created a platform on which it can implement a VoIP solution with relative ease.
"It's important that we deliver service that helps us to stay ahead of the competitors," explains Baker. This is a challenge that has to be grappled with on a non-stop basis. How does International SOS manage this challenge? Baker: "Our strategy of being able to deliver a global footprint is a key element in this thinking. This takes us back to our fundamental approach in implementing technology - integrating IT with communications in one system."
From mind to matter
It started as an idea hatched by Singapore's prime minister during a trip to Scandinavia in 1996.Construction started in 1997. But the emerging markets' financial crisis struck soon after, putting a stop on development. Construction recommended in 2000 and the building was completed in the same year.
What began as an idea in the prime minister's mind has materialised with the creation of the Nordic European Centre, an intelligent building comprising 22,000 sq m of office space, located at Singapore's International Business Park. This building was conceived for the purpose of enticing Scandinavian SMEs to set up operations in Asia, using Singapore as a launch pad. But soon after construction recommended, the Nordic European Centre opened its doors to other European companies as well.
Fledgling start
One of the risks foreign SMEs have to manage in starting operations in a new region is the burden of having to incur high upfront costs without a clue as to how long it will take before they start to rake in profit, if ever. The other risk is the difficulty of operating in environments where the business culture is substantially different to that of the home country. These risks were the key reasons why this building was constructed: To provide its tenants with a hospitable and technologically sophisticated, yet affordable, operating environment.
SMEs are often thrown into a Catch-22 situation when it comes to investing in ICT infrastructure. They require access to first-rate ICT infrastructure to compete, but investing in high-quality solutions is expensive for such businesses. Furthermore, implementing ICT infrastructure can be a challenging experience for an SME or enterprise if it lacks expertise in managing it. This is why the Nordic European Centre turned to T-Systems ITC Singapore Pte. Ltd., the enterprise-service division of German communication-services provider Deutsche Telekom AG. T-Systems provides tenants with voice, data and Internet services. It can set up e-mail accounts, provide broadband access, implement security solutions and VPNs. All this takes away tenants' worry of having to set up and manage their own ICT infrastructure. "T-Systems provides a one-stop shop for our clients," says Goh Ek Boon, CEO, Nordic European Centre Pte. Ltd.
Joy of sharing
Tenants using shared infrastructure enjoy lower capex and opex costs as compared with managing ICT infrastructure on their own.
For example, T-Systems has set up a shared data centre, which means that tenants save on space needed to accommodate a server or servers within their office, not forgetting the savings on renovation and installation and the ongoing cost of hiring an IT administrator. "There is always at least one T-Systems engineer on duty on site during office hours," says Goh.
Why did NEC select T-Systems? "We evaluated several service providers. One of the reasons that motivated us to select T-Systems was the fact that they had already implemented the ICT infrastructure at the German Centre, another high-tech building at the International Business Park," says Goh. "Therefore it made sense for the Nordic European Centre to approach Deutsche Telekom (as T-Systems was then known) to do the same for us." The other factors were Deutsche Telekom's respected brand name and global reach. There was one other factor as well: T-Systems undertook to bear the cost of wiring the building. "Not many service providers were willing to do this. This has reduced our development cost. As a result, we have been able to pass this saving on to our tenants."
The shared ICT solution approach also offers a value-proposition, not only cost savings, says Goh. "This solution offers easy scalability and, furthermore, tenants are assured that the technology will always be updated to meet their expectations."
Say, a new tenant starts with only three employees, but it has planned to increase staffing to 10 in a year's time. However, business is growing much faster than anticipated and, as a result, it ramps up to15 in nine months. Unexpected surges in growth can put a company ICT's infrastructure under strain.
On the other hand, if a company does invest in surplus capacity to prevent such strains from occurring, it will be spending on equipment that it is not presently using, which will lower its operational ROI. "The shared infrastructure approach offers tenants with equipment, services and capacity on an 'as'- and 'when'-needed basis. As a result, tenants don't have to over invest in surplus capacity. They can be accommodated if they overshoot," says Goh.