Dial 'T' for TechAccess

The heat was on for Gary Dennis '96EMBA.

The TechAccess system he was developing for use by BellSouth's 16,000 technicians in its nine-state region was "mission critical," meaning that failure was not an option. The millennium was drawing to a close and the old "dumb" terminal that TechAccess would replace was not Y2K compliant. On Jan. 1, 2000, it would be useless.

"It was a rather large challenge," recalls Dennis, general manager of BellSouth's Network Operations Solutions Group. "It's got to be one of the hardest things I've ever done."

TechAccess is the wireless laptop personal computer system that enables BellSouth's army of technicians to quickly access all the information they need about each repair customer. It saves each technician forty-five minutes every day.

Prior to TechAccess, technicians had terminals with no intelligence. During service calls, repairmen used customer lines to get trouble tickets and service orders, test lines, file time reports, and obtain customer histories.

Technicians didn't want to tie up customer lines, so they connected and disconnected several times during a service call--or even went elsewhere to make the calls when customer lines didn't work at all.

"When we rolled these laptops out, it was the largest mobile computing rollout that we know of in the world," declares Dennis, a West Point graduate who joined Southern Bell after he left the U.S. Army in 1978. "The project basically consisted of three parts. We had to select a rugged laptop PC and develop a wireless infrastructure. Then we had to build a computer application in the data center to deal with the laptop PCs"

With twenty patents pending, TechAccess has won three awards, and the project papers are part of the permanent archive on U.S. information technology at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The project was born while Dennis was working on his EMBA. In fact, he demonstrated TechAccess in one of Benn Konsynskiís classes--and the wireless network part didn't work.

"I came back from class and told my folks I could not get out of the building wirelessly. So my class presentation was a precursor to a bigger problem that I was going to have to face. We worked two years and fixed the wireless problem," Dennis says.

Though he figures it took him a year to recover from EMBA studies "from a health and family perspective," Dennis adds, "I really feel like I used just about everything I learned."

--Carol Carter

top