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Bank of America rolling out VOIP

18.11.2006
Craig Hinkley, senior vice president of network services for Bank of America Corp., is overseeing an enormous voice-over-IP (VOIP) project with Electronic Data Services Inc. (EDS) that will bring 180,000 IP phones to the bank's U.S. operations. Although the massive project isn't expected to be completed for another two years or so, Hinkley talked this week about how the effort is going.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

You talked at VoiceCon about the bank's VOIP project in February 2005. Is it still on target? Yes, the target is still 180,000 IP phones, and it's going along nicely. They are Cisco IP-based phones, and we've actually got the program split into three separate areas for branch retail, enterprise and call centers. We split it into three efforts to focus on each subprogram and to get it running without trying to boil the ocean, so to speak.

In 2005, the first order of business was to get the consumer retail program up and running. Of 180,000 total phones, we have roughly 60,000 in retail, 60,000 in enterprise and 60,000 in a number of contact centers. We first focused on retail, with 6,000 branches, and had to get that program up and running. It's doing well, with 800 out of 6,000 branches completed. We are doing this with EDS, our outsourcer that we contracted with in 2003, which will deploy and manage it.

What about enterprise and contact centers? Enterprise is started, and we've completed 50 enterprise locations. We're kicking off the contact center effort before the end of the year, and the first location will be a medium-size contact center for internal operations used to serve bank associates in the Charlotte, N.C., area. We're adopting the Microsoft methodology to eat your own dog food, working with our people first.

So, today, you have how many phones installed? We are north of 20,000. It's going very well. From a technology perspective, it's going well, with the processes and the program. I would say that what we've done in the last 18 months is focus on establishing the program, processes and standards of what we're deploying. What we've had to do is take heritage PBX switches that have been out there 10 to 15 years and peel back the layers of the onion to understand things and determine the standard telephony interaction model to support the business. We're realizing we can now deploy ubiquitous features and functions with IP. It translates to the business, so I can have now a common telephony interaction model in the U.S. We've had lot of conversations with divisional executives about how we want VOIP nationally to support business processes. It's not just been a technology transformation, but a business process transformation.