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Rapid Development Speeds Recovery
Learn how Verizon managed
September 11 NYC phone service
recovery using a VS.NET
customer service tool finished
in one weekend.
by Edmund X. DeJesus
Not long after the September 11 attacks in New York City, recovery and renewal had already begun. Homeless families were taken in by friends and relatives. Schoolchildren began attending classes, safely removed from the destruction. Businesses relocated. People began to resume their lives, go back to their work, and follow their "normal" daily routine.
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Executive Summary
Company
Fortune 10 company, Verizon Communications, is one of the largest providers of wired and wireless telecommunications in the United States, with more than 125 million lines and 28 million wireless customers.
Project
Manage restoration of service to customers and recon-struction of infrastructure, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
Legacy
Existing Visual Basic 6 and Active Server Pages (ASP) application, contracted by Verizon to Ajilon, completed. Newer .NET-based version 80 percent completed.
Solution
Complete .NET version of application. Use .NET version as foundation for extensive new features.
Tools
• Windows 2000
• SQL Server 2000
• ASP.NET
• Visual Basic .NET
• Visual Studio .NET
• UltraWebNavigator (Infragistics) Challenges
• Managing the rapid restoration of service to customers without impacting other customers.
• Handling thousands of internal users via intranet.
• Unpredictable increases in database size. |
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Technology is not so resilient. Buildings don't reconstruct themselves. Roads and subways don't repair themselves. Utilities don't restore themselves. It's often during crises such as this that we truly appreciate the services we usually take for granted: running water, electricity, a dial tone…
Indeed, the recovery of communications is one of the success stories of this disaster. Yes, there were outages and circuits in the area were jammed for days. Yet remarkably, considering the devastation, the communications so essential to our connections with other human beings went on. The phone service was restored, and recovery from the destruction proceeded day by day.
This was no small feat. In New York City, the infrastructure that carries calls, the switching circuits that route calls, the lines to individual phones, and the support databases that match logical phone numbers to physical phone lines were all destroyed, damaged, or severed from the rest of the system. Those responsible for restoring this vital communication had to decide how to reassemble this mind-boggling collection of hardware and information quickly and efficiently. They needed to evaluate where to best allocate limited resources to get the most lines working the soonest, and decide what replacement equipment would be necessary where.
By an astonishing coincidence, Verizon Communications, a major telecommunications provider in New York City, had a tool at hand that could take on this monumental task. As with many who were yanked from their usual routine to assist in the crisis, this tool was drafted from its original purpose to handle far more than was initially intended. Code-named Mustang, this software application was originally created by Ajilon (Towson, Md.) to assist Verizon managers in planning and analyzing the status of work orders. However, it soon received a far more important and urgent assignment.
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