BOB PuTnam
Bob Putnam
SVP and CIO
Suddenlink
Bob Putnam is senior vice president and chief
information officer for Suddenlink.
Cable IT job descriptions vary widely, from
company to company. What in a nutshell is yours?
I oversee a team responsible for all aspects of the
company’s IT department, including enterprise systems for financials, human resources, billing, mediation, data warehousing and business intelligence,
public Web site, customer portal, custom applications,
and knowledge, workforce, and database management. In addition, the teams I manage oversee IT
Infrastructure across the company footprint for data
centers, internal LAN/WAN, desktop, and employee
help desk. Finally, the program management office
is set up and run out of the IT department for large-scale, cross-functional initiatives. The IT department
supports all of the regions and departments in a centralized IT model for these enterprise needs.
What aspect of your job do you find the most
challenging? The most rewarding?
The most challenging aspect, to date, would be the
2007 project we undertook to stand up a telephone,
mediation and provisioning platform for our subscribers as part of our mid-2006 acquisition of
selected Cox properties. Through that acquisition,
we inherited roughly 35,000 phone customers on the
divesting company’s telephone platforms. In addition,
Suddenlink needed to build the telephony team and
corresponding processes associated with delivering phone to customers. Our objective was to stand
up all of our own telephone platforms and migrate
those legacy customers on to our platforms and corresponding processes. In addition, we were tasked
with turning up rate centers to deliver phone into 80
percent-plus of our footprint by the end of 2007.
The most rewarding aspect of my job has been the
overall experience of managing the necessary people,
processes and technology to support the company’s
evolution from a startup phase to approximately 1.3
million subscribers and 4,700 employees.
For several years, there’s been an effort to get
individual services out of their individual silos and
into a more unified whole. Do you see this actually
happening? If so, how has it affected your job?
Where applicable, the Suddenlink IT organization
14 Supplement to Communications Technology
has taken an enterprise view from the outset, for our
people, processes and technology. This approach has
positioned the company to capitalize on a unified,
holistic view and to minimize silos for enterprise
needs, where applicable.
By taking this unified holistic approach—i.e.,
maximizing the capability of enterprise systems so
we don’t have to consider disparate departmental systems—Suddenlink has been able to:
• Reduce risk and effort when integrating acquisitions
• Reduce the resource and capital requirements
required because there are fewer systems and integration tasks required to run our operations
• Standardize on our operational model across
regions, where applicable
Do you see other silos (billing, provisioning, CSR)
that need to be combined?
At Suddenlink, we have billing and mediation in one
team to ensure that our orders are flowing in an automated fashion with as high a success rate as possible.
Our high-speed data orders are flowing from billing
and mediation to provisioning, in almost all transaction types, with a 99-plus percent success rate. As it
relates to telephony orders, we have automated order
flow from billing and mediation to provisioning.
What are the biggest challenges involved in
working with OSSs and BSSs?
Telephony orders are the biggest challenge for OSSs
and BSSs. With the number of systems impacted and
the need for the information to be precise (especially
when porting numbers), we must ensure that orders
flow successfully in an automated fashion. This challenge grows as the company grows, with more and
more people taking orders and performing installs.
Comprehensive training on processes and technology
is an essential step in the initial rollout for OSS and
BSS, and it’s just as critical to have ongoing training.
What are some of the IT challenges in offering
business services as opposed to residential?
The complexity is much greater for business services,
especially in the area of telephony orders. There are
many more features, lines and technology needs for
business phone services than residential. Accordingly,
the systems have to be more complex and flexible to
accommodate business telephony needs. ■
