9 Hot Trends for '99

ith its vintage 1962 telephone system on its last legs and no money to pay for a new one, the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers' Pittsburgh District assigned a team to investigate what could be done.

The Communications and Electronics Team came back with a solution that's saving the Pittsburgh District at least $120,000 a year while improving its phone service. The team won a Hammer Award from the National Performance Review for its work. What's more, the upgrade moved the office toward the next era of communications -that is, toward the union of voice, data and video communications.

A decade ago, telephone and data communications services were utterly separate. Both kinds of communications traveled over the public telephone system, but got there in different ways, and the people responsible for them seldom worked together. Today, that's changing. "Convergence" has been a major industry buzzword for a couple of years now. So far, it's more talk than action. But in places such as the federal building in Pittsburgh, convergence is starting to happen.

There, Greg Formosa of the Corps' Information Management Office and his team found they could install a digital telephone switch that would manage the phone traffic and send calls going outside the office onto a trunk line. That meant the office could cut the number of outbound phone lines from 450 (one for each employee's desk) to just 60, with no effects on the telephone users.

The key is the fact that all the employees never try to call outside the office at the same time. With the old system, even if an employee was calling a co-worker in the next cubicle, the call traveled out of the office and into the public phone system, so a separate phone line was required. But the new system keeps in-office calls inside. It turns out, Formosa says, that 40 of the 60 outbound lines sit idle most of the time, and peak usage seldom exceeds 30 calls at once. He plans to cut back on outgoing lines.

This system bypasses the Pittsburgh area phone switch operated by the General Services Administration for federal agencies, so the Army Corps district no longer has to pay GSA's per-line surcharges. "GSA was upset with us, of course," Formosa says, but the economics were compelling once agencies were free to bypass GSA.

The $200,000 price tag for the phone system, a Comdial DXP+ installed by Telephonix Inc. of Pittsburgh, included new telephone sets for the 500 employees, voice mail and installation services. After the smooth cutover on a weekend in 1997, the biggest inconvenience, Formosa says, was that all the office phone numbers had to change. As for the technical staff, they can adjust the system easily, avoiding service calls that used to run $150 or so each time a phone needed to be moved.

Although the new phone system is digital, which means it fundamentally resembles a computer more than a conventional telephone system, it doesn't seem unusual to the Corps employees who use it. But the information management staff is trying out a fairly radical improvement.

The software they are testing would provide "unified messaging." With it, an employee using a PC would have an e-mail in-box listing incoming e-mail, voice mail and fax messages. If the PC has speakers, the user could click on a voice mail message and hear it through the computer. When checking voice mail by phone, the employee would get the same in-box listings verbally and could have the system read e-mail messages aloud-a great advantage for employees working outside the office. What's more, the employee could reply to an e-mail via the phone. The digital recording would show up as a message file in the recipient's PC in-box.

Whether the Pittsburgh District headquarters will decide to install integrated messaging anytime soon is uncertain. The software probably would cost less than $30,000, but there are other considerations. For example, the upgrade would place a big load on the office's computer file storage systems, because it would introduce voice-mail files to the PC network, and a voice-mail file is much larger than the equivalent e-mail file.

Even without integrated messaging, the digital nature of the phone system is yielding benefits for managers. They can get a per-employee breakdown of telephone costs that was not available before. Those records can help them budget and control phone abuse.

Formosa has no plans yet for transmitting computer files through the phone system, as an alternative or supplement to data networks. "Once you do that, you have to start partitioning off part of the system," he says, to keep the voice and data streams from interfering with each other.

The U.S. Information Agency is experimenting with an international satellite network that carries both voice and data. Although used primarily for Internet mail and World Wide Web access, the network can bypass unreliable local telephone systems and expand the voice communications options for users at U.S. posts abroad.

In a recent report, information technology market-watchers at International Data Corp. said the Internet's ability to carry voice traffic along with data "has the capacity to redefine" the voice communications industry. But the IDC researchers said voice on the Internet today "is still very much a trial balloon," partly because technical standards are in flux. To send data from one computer to another, they must agree on the form of the transmission, but there are no widely accepted standards for voice on the Internet yet.

Nonetheless, there's wide agreement that there's no turning back in the trend toward convergence. Conventional telephone systems are being converted to digital systems, and as that happens, the line between phones and computers is increasingly blurred.

Federal executives' challenge is to jump aboard the convergence bandwagon at the right time -the time when the technology has stabilized enough to mitigate the risks and when the business case is sound. The small steps taken by agencies such as the Corps of Engineers and USIA will position them to be ready.