Joe Gieri
Executive Director Office of Information
Product(s): QMOE
Customer service
"Service with our account rep has been excellent; that's one of the many reasons why we looked at moving forward
with the QMOE solution from Qwest. We have an account rep that's very good about responding to us. We pick up the
phone, we call, we meet, we talk. My account rep and I actually even work out together, so I have a good
relationship with this person and I'm confident, too, if it wasn't the person that I work with, it would be anybody
from Qwest because there's been other times when I've called up people from Qwest and we just work through issues or
questions. They're a good technology partner.
We depend on the competency of the business partners we use. The staff that I have-generally, I have a pretty
frequent turnover in staff, so one of the challenges I have is I will spend a lot of time and dollars training
people, getting them up to speed, and I'm working in an environment that generally people do a lot of moving around
from business to business. Sometimes I find myself as being a training ground for the corporate sector. But the
good news is that when I pick up the phone and when I have a partner that I have trust in and have to be able to
work with, I have to know that these people on the other end of the phone are people that have knowledge, complete
knowledge, and understanding of their products and they understand our environment as well. I depend on that when
I'm working with my business partners, so this was a big reason why, and a very important reason why, we moved
forward with this service.
Bottom line is the service works. We have had-up until approximately a month ago, I would have been able to answer this question and say 'There have been no problems. None. Nothing. No reasons to call; it just works.'
However, about a month ago we had a problem, and it was kind of interesting working through this because I think
what had happened is because we never had to work with a problem in our QMOE service, we weren't exactly sure where
to call, and when we called the Qwest team, what I found kind of astonishing is that they haven't had to deal with a
problem with the QMOE service, either. So it was kind of interesting, what we had-it was a learning experience for
both of us. Basically, what we saw is that my staff had to learn the right numbers to call and Qwest teams had to
kind of coordinate and figure out 'No, we've got a QMOE problem. How are we gonna fix it on this end?' Once we
ironed those out, it was very interesting to see the level of communications that occurred between my staff and
Qwest, and really what I saw was a camaraderie and teaming through resolving the issue. It's not that the issue
took a long time to resolve; it was a matter of making sure we were bringing the right people to the table to
resolve the problem."
Non-financial benefits
"The benefits we experienced right away with deploying this QMOE solution was we experienced reliability.
Secondly, and right on top of that, was bandwidth. This was huge. So what we were experiencing is a very smooth
delivery of these courseware to each of the classrooms at our campuses. The instant relief I experienced right away
was at my help desk. I wasn't getting the phone calls that I was getting in the past. Silent lines in an IT
department is something that's very solid to me; that means no news is good news; it means we're doing things right.
So that was some of the immediate benefits that we experienced from the QMOE services.
First thing I heard was from our distance learning director, then our institutional media research department,
basically were telling me 'Wow, what a difference. We're seeing the difference right now.' And that was music to
my ears because once they're able to get to it, they're-typically what happens is my distance learning director has
a direct line of communications with faculty; faculty have a direct line of communication with the students, so that
all kind of filters back my direction when they're not seeing good performance. So the immediate relief we were
seeing was that performance to the classroom.
The other big benefit that we had seen is we have an emerging and evolving student services department. Student
services was able to experience better bandwidth through the registration and our student information system. We
deployed multiple registration departments or service desks to each of our campuses where students could then use
our online or web registration from each of these campuses, and this is big. This is a huge, important piece of our
business. There're some key things that we look at, key points in time in a term, and registration is one of them.
We have hundreds of students-thousands of students-that come into our campuses to do registration, so having that
student information system up and running and available over our wide area is important to us."
Benefits
"When I think in terms of measurable benefits, did I mention total cost of ownership? Did I mention bandwidth? Did
I mention reliability? Reduced calls at my help desk? That was very important to me. Those were measurable things
that I had seen right off the bat.
The other thing is when it came to the impacts to my staff in terms of the support model, that to me was very
significant. So when you think in terms of calls coming in and deploying staff to first answer the phone, to look
into the issue, whatever it may be-because most of the time you're gonna have to research an issue, and is it
really some kind of a network problem that you're having or is it a desktop problem or is it a server problem? So
when I started looking at those impacts to my staff that I felt were measurable, right away the thing that I noticed
was reduced number of help desk tickets. That's huge to me; now I can use these same staff for other projects,
other tasks that I have inside of my department.
Now I'm preparing to go through a major upgrade of the centralized storage system that I wanted to deploy originally, and I think now with the QMOE solution in place, I'll be able to experience a significant savings
because I'm looking at a true centralized storage system; I'm not having to look into remote storage solutions, I'm
not having to look into remote servers to hook up to the storage solutions and not the same network connections.
I'm basically looking at a centralized storage solution back at my main campus that I'll be able to serve all of my
campuses from. I don't know the exact dollar figure, but I can tell you when I'm looking at five campuses and a
storage solution at each one of these campuses, it's a significant savings for our college."
