Index

Information Management

Telecommunications

Introduction/Background

Date of last assessment: October 1999

The telecommunications functional area received the following ratings in the FY 1999 Annual Appraisal: 

1.1.a.4 Video conferencing system is meeting the community's needs - Outstanding

1.1.a.5 Emergency communications system as defined on 4/3/96 is operating as specified and meeting customer's needs (CSS and content analysis) - Outstanding

1.1.b.4 Phone orders are processed in a timely fashion and meeting customer needs (CSS and order analysis) - Outstanding

1.1.b.5 Phone repairs are completed in a timely fashion and meeting customer needs (CSS and order analysis) - Outstanding

Our self-assessment team identified areas of opportunity for enhanced performance and will address those areas in the following report.

There were no open items from the 1999 review.

Departmental Overview

Laboratory Mission

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is dedicated to experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics and in those fields that make use of its synchrotron radiation facilities, including biology, chemistry, geology, material science and electrical engineering. This includes the development of new techniques in particle acceleration and detection, and of synchrotron radiation sources and associated instrumentation. The Center is operated as a national user facility for the Department of Energy by Stanford University.

Organizational Missions

The Telephone Services functional area manages telephone services as a corporate resource to improve the quality of its services, to add value to scientific programs and customer services, and as a tool to improve work processes.  Telephone service will be made available to the community, the public, industrial partners, and others, as appropriate.  The focus this year was on reducing misuse of telecommunications services by improved tracking of telephone locations; researching and analyzing options for a switch replacement or contract re-negotiation; and reducing hardware order completion times.

Identification of Self-Assessment Report Staff

Names, titles, affiliations of participants

Les Cottrell, Assistant Director, SLAC Computing Services

Brenda Eberle, Telecommunications Analyst, SLAC Computing Services

Fred Hooker, Network Operations Supervisor, SLAC Computing Services

Status of Systems

This report represents the results of the telecommunications functional area self-assessment, an ongoing process begun as part of the Business Management Oversight pilot established by DOE in March 1995 and continued by executive order as part of DOE performance-based management.  Assessment material was collected over the past year, followed by a process of validation of findings, analysis and report writing.  The telecommunications functional area self-assessment is based on and measured against performance activities currently agreed to between SLAC and DOE/OAK in order to address customer satisfaction, cost efficiency, and contract compliance.

SLAC has a multi-year service subcontract with Williams Communications to provide the majority of telecommunications services including video conferencing and voice mail services currently in use.  The subcontract period began in July 1988 and will end in February 2002.  This service includes Williams' owned switching equipment, the telephone cable plant and a dedicated technician.  SLAC has month-to-month agreements with other telecommunications service providers for traffic carrier services, radio and paging services, and cellular phone service, which are renewed on a fiscal year basis.  These vendors include Pacific Bell, for local calling and network access, ISDN and measured business lines; STS, AT&T and FTS2000, for long distance calling; AirTouch, for wide area paging service; Motorola, for mobile radio services; and CellularOne, for cellular phone service. 

The Williams-supplied telephone system includes a 4,150-port digital electronic switching system and a cable plant that is adequate to the system but is stretched and old. The cable plant is based on twisted pair copper technology with surge protectors, both within and between buildings.  The switch is capable of supporting more advanced and expensive digital technologies such as Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). The system includes direct inward dial service, voice mail, government and public network access, paging access and video conferencing.  The system supports a majority of mass-market, single-line instruments (3200 ports) and some proprietary multi-line instruments (600 ports) to provide secretarial type functions.  The remaining 350 ports are used for trunks.  The system provides alarm circuits, emergency communications, and back up power capability.

During the past year, we have worked with users, the facilities group, and other individuals to complete an inventory of telephone lines.  We have verified the locations of over 99 percent of our existing lines.  Telephone locations are now tracked through the SLAC Institutional Database. 

We have negotiated with Williams to provide an upgrade that will bring our switch hardware and software to current levels.  The upgrade will also include hardware to support ISDN PRI's for our local and FTS2001 traffic, and improvements to our system management tools.  This will be done at no additional cost to the contract.

SLAC pays for a majority of the Williams-provided phone service on a guaranteed fixed price per line per month basis for the life of the contract, with the exceptions of the voice mail and video conferencing systems that SLAC owns.  Carrier services are based on current CPUC tariff and federal government rates and paging and radio services using a negotiated rate structure.

The system is managed in partnership with Telecommunications Staff and user representatives called Area Telecommunications Office Motivators (ATOMs).  ATOMs were appointed by group leaders in 1987 to represent a group or geographical area of from 15-200 phones and/or users.  They interface with the Telecommunications staff using user-driven on-line tools developed by Telecommunications to activate services and identify order status.  Lead-times to complete requests for changes are from one to four weeks, depending on type of request.

The activities of the Telecommunications functional area include, but are not limited to, providing wired and wireless telephone, radio, paging, and video conferencing services. This year the areas of telephone services and emergency communications were assessed

Discussion of Individual Performance Objectives

2000 Telephone Services Self-Assessment

Services: We were able to negotiate rates for local toll calls that are slightly better than the rates we were getting for calls over our foreign exchange lines serving San Francisco and the East Bay.  As a result, we disconnected a group of eight foreign exchange lines in February, and are now routing that traffic through STS.  Because our previous traffic study showed that we were slightly over-trunked on our local route, we were able to absorb the additional traffic and bring that group close to its target utilization.

We have maintained eight tie lines to the Stanford Campus for many years.  These lines were lightly used and maintained primarily for the convenience of our users.  Because the equipment used for these facilities was old and no longer maintainable, we worked with the identified users of these lines to ensure that they could access Campus via local telephone calls.  We also worked with SLAC's Security department, who took over calls to SLAC's main-listed number that were previously routed to the Campus operators.  The eight tie lines were disconnected in April.

We have obtained a traffic study through Williams Communications to review our current requirements.  At the time our PBX is upgraded, we will replace our DID trunks and local outgoing trunks with four ISDN PRI's.  This will provide us with some additional economy of scale with respect to the total number of trunks needed to support our traffic.  In addition, we will be able to provide our users calling party identification on digital display phones.

Our transition of FTS2000 voice services to FTS2001 is scheduled to coincide with the upgrade of our PBX.  Bringing these services directly into the PBX, rather than through the Teleos hub, will significantly improve the reliability and serviceability of the connections.

Telephone Orders Meet Customer Needs: During the 1998 fiscal year, we replaced our previous telephone order system that ran on VM with the new SLAC Phone Request System (SPRS), based on the commercial Remedy application, with Web interfaces for users.  During the past year we have continued to make improvements to the system as needed.  We have transitioned to a largely paperless workflow for tracking orders within the Telecommunications group.  The new system was well received by the ATOMs (Area Telecommunications Office Motivators), who submit orders for their departments.  And the ATOMs have reported that the system continues to become easier to use as they gain more experience with it. 

In addition to the objective data collected from the SLAC Phone Request System, we used the services of a consultant from outside our department to request anonymous feedback from the ATOMs through a short survey.  We requested responses to five questions, several of which were similar to questions used in previous surveys.  A long-standing question about the usefulness of the SLAC Telephone User's Guide was replaced with a question about the SPRS.  This reflects the fact that the Web-based SPRS is now the primary entry point for most ATOMs to access telephone information and services.  Twenty-four out of fifty-nine ATOMs chose to participate in the survey.

For analysis purposes, we divide the orders into two types: software and hardware. 

Our goal is to complete most software orders in one week or less.  

The following table shows selected measurements for software orders.

The following graph shows the number of software orders completed in a specific number of days and the cumulative percentage of orders completed within that time period.  Eighty-six percent of software orders are completed within one week.

Our goal is to complete most hardware orders within one month.  Some orders can stay in the system for much longer for reasons that are largely beyond our control.  Examples include waiting for access to tunnels and waiting for users to complete construction or install conduit.  In addition, we have a single technician available to handle both hardware orders and repairs.  Because repairs generally receive higher priority than new orders, work on hardware orders can be delayed for several days while other problems are resolved.  For these reasons, we believe it is realistic to expect hardware orders to take somewhat longer than other types.

The following table shows selected measurements for hardware orders.

The following graph shows the number of hardware orders completed in a specific number of days and the cumulative percentage of orders completed within that time period.   Sixty-one percent of hardware orders are completed within thirty days.

 
ATOMs were asked to indicate whether they agreed with the statement "Software orders are completed in a reasonable length of time."  They were given a five-point scale (strongly disagree, disagree, acceptable, agree, and strongly agree).  One hundred percent of ATOMs rated performance as acceptable or better.  In 1999, ninety-four percent of ATOMS rated performance as acceptable or better.

ATOMs were also asked to indicate whether they agreed with the statement "Hardware orders are completed in a reasonable length of time."  Seventy-eight percent of ATOMs rated performance as acceptable or better.  In 1999, seventy-six percent of ATOMs rated performance as acceptable or better.

In 1998, ATOMs were asked to respond to a single statement "Orders are completed in a reasonable length of time."  Sixty percent of ATOMs rated performance as acceptable or better.  So we have continued to show improvement in user satisfaction with order timeliness.

We have taken several actions to reduce the time required to complete hardware orders.  We have made improvements to the reports used to track performance on orders.  We have added automated reminders to alert the person an order is assigned to, if they have not updated the order within the past seven days.  We have also performed weekly order analysis and prioritization for hardware orders that are open in excess of fourteen days.  Performance in this area has been gradually improving over the last several months and we expect to see continued improvement during the coming year.

Telephone Repairs Meet Customer Needs: Any person at SLAC can request a telephone repair either by using a Web-based form in the SLAC Phone Request System (SPRS) described above, or by leaving a voice message on the phone repair line.  In the past, the data collected from both of these sources was accumulated to compute statistics on time to order completion.  This year we have collected data only from the Phone Request System.  Based on previous experience, we know that repairs reported through the SPRS tend to be more complex and take slightly longer to complete than those reported through the telephone repair line.

Due to the difficulties involved in obtaining a representative sample of all telephone users at SLAC, we relied upon the ATOMs to provide subjective feedback on behalf of all their users through the survey described above.

The data collected indicate that over forty-six percent of repairs are completed in one day or less.  The chart below shows the frequency and cumulative percent of repairs completed in a given number of days. 

ATOMs were asked to indicate whether they agreed with the statement "Repairs are completed in a timely fashion."  They were given a five-point scale (strongly disagree, disagree, acceptable, agree, and strongly agree).  Ninety-two percent of the ATOMs rated performance as acceptable or better, compared to eighty-two percent in the 1999 survey, and sixty-eight percent in the 1998 survey.

2000 Emergency Communications Self-Assessment

It is the responsibility of each person in the emergency organization to determine what communications resources they need to fulfill their responsibilities.  Beyond the role of the Emergency Communications Manager in restoring telecommunications services and allocating alternate resources in an actual emergency, we provide services to the emergency organization in the same manner as we do to other users.  That is we help users to clarify their actual communications needs, provide information about available alternatives, provide services where appropriate, and refer users to other resources for products and services we do not provide.

During the past year, tests of the emergency communications systems were conducted ten times. SLAC’s Emergency Coordinator indicated that his primary concern in regards to the emergency communications tests is to test the wireless systems on a regular basis. The responsibility for running these tests has been taken over by SLAC’s wireless communications analyst. Following each test, users verbally communicate the quality of the tests results to the wireless analyst. If there were any portable/base station/mobile unit problems, the wireless analyst would have completed the necessary repairs. No problems with emergency wireless equipment were reported.

In addition, during the past year, preventive maintenance was done twice on all emergency wireless equipment. The wireless analyst conducted tests to ensure each emergency wireless portable/base station/mobile transmit frequency, output power level, and receiver sensitivity were within specification. During preventive maintenance, the wireless analyst found that one base station transmit output power level did not meet specifications.  This was repaired.

The Emergency Coordinator indicated the current emergency communications system continues to meet the user's needs. There is also support for continuing the wireless tests and preventative maintenance. We plan to continue support for the wireless tests and preventative maintenance for this area.

Contract compliance:

Our assessment team found the telecommunications functional area to be in compliance with laws, regulations and, terms and conditions of the current DOE contract.  The telecommunications functional area assessment team found no fraud, waste, or abuse issues.

Objectives/Goals for FY 2001

1. Complete the telephone switch upgrade.  Learn about and take advantage of new administrative capabilities.

2. Work with Williams to perform physical remediation of the phone cable system.

3. Improve the accuracy of the electronic cable database.  Transition from reliance on paper records to full utilization of the electronic database.

4. Complete research and analysis of options for a switch replacement or contract re-negotiation.  Make a recommendation and plan for the transition.