Customer Solution Case Study
/ National Institute Provides Unified Communications to Create Better Service for Census Workers
Overview
Country or Region:Mexico
Industry:Government
Customer Profile
The Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) specializes in the collection and organization of statistical, demographic, geographical, and economic information.
Business Situation
INEGI needed a centralized communication platform to help employees share information in a secure environment.
Solution
INEGI deployed a Microsoft Unified Communications solution to unify communication channels, increase the level of communications services for its employees, and provide a security-enhanced communication environment.
Benefits
- Eased sharing of information
- Better level of service to more users
- Established foundation for
advanced communications
Armando Zuñiga, Systems and Communications Director, INEGI
The Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) is a Mexican government agency that is responsible for collecting and organizing statistical, demographic, geographical, and economic data about the country and its inhabitants. Communication between central locations, remote offices, and traveling staffis critical to work processes within the organization. Traditional telephony and email solutions were often not meeting the collaboration needs of employees. Increasingly, its employees were using public instant messaging and voice over IP programs to share data. To provide a security-enhanced way for employees to communicate and share real-time information across regions, INEGI decided to deploy a Microsoft Unified Communications solution.By using the solution’s instant messaging, conferencing, presence, and telephony capabilities,employees are more efficient at their jobs.
Situation
INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía) was founded in 1983 with the merger of two other government agencies, the Bureau of Statistics and the Bureau of Geography. Headquartered in the Mexican city of Aguascalientes, INEGI collects and organizes data concerning the Mexican people and their country, including the National Population and Housing Census, the Economic Information Dataset, the Economic Census, the National Income Expenditure Survey, and the National Employment Survey, as well as date maps and charts of the state’s geography.
INEGI has 18,000 employees in regional offices across Mexico who conduct critical surveys to collect information that drives government aid programs and shapes international relations. Surveys can be quarterly or yearly, but the data is often sensitive and timely. Employees also field requests for information from thousands of users across the country and around the world. To communicate with customers and with each other, INEGI employees were relying on a traditional private branch exchange (PBX) telephony system from Avaya, as well as an email messaging system based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. They also used Microsoft Office Live Meeting as their conferencing solution. Increasingly, to save time and costs, employees were also using widely available public instant messaging programs and voice over IP (VoIP) solutions such as Skype to share information.
As more employees came to depend on instant messaging and VoIP solutions to communicate, INEGI realized it faced several challenges. The agency was concerned about the lack of security in public instant messaging programs, because the information flowed through personal accounts. The IT department also worried that it lacked control over the software and had no control over who had access to its network through these programs. The other challenge it faced was the stress of supporting employees who had installed different versions of instant messaging clients.
INEGI realized that instant messaging and VoIP capabilities were critical for their employees to do their jobs. The agency wanted to find a way to provide secure communications capabilities to its employees, especially with the upcoming national census in 2010.
Solution
At the end of 2008, INEGI tested a pilot of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. The agency believed that the Microsoft Unified Communications solution contained the appropriate features it wanted to provide for the organization, but at the time it did not have the infrastructure to deploy the solution. It also briefly considered solutions from Avaya and Cisco, but found Microsoft Unified Communications to be a complete and fully integrated solution with its existing Microsoft messaging environment.
In January 2010, INEGI began the deployment of its unified communications solution. An internal team deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and INEGI worked with Microsoft Certified Partner Grupo Unika to deploy Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and provide voice integration with the Avaya PBX system. By March 2010, it had implemented a full Unified Communications solution for 2,000 employees, including instant messaging, presence, Web conferencing, audio conferencing, voice, and Exchange Unified Messaging.
Since INEGI deployed the solution, employees are using instant messaging broadly, and those who have access to broadband connections in their homes are also using Office Communications Server as their primary voice solution when they work from home. Mobile employees also use Office Communications Server as their voice solution if they need to call into the office from a customer site, hotel, or conference center. With the integration of Live Meeting and Web conferencing, employees anywhere with a broadband connection can click to start an instant meeting. The agency’s help-desk employees also use the desktop sharing capability to resolve issues for employees in regional offices.
As 2010 progresses, INEGI plans to continue migrating its regional offices to Exchange Server 2007. Executives and other special users will have a special profile for Office Communications Server to provide them with an improved level of secure communications, allowingthe IT department to more easily resolve issues and provide support to them. It will also integrate its video conferencing solution with Office Communications Server. As it moves forward, it plans to consider upgrading to Exchange Server 2010 or to Exchange Online to provide broader messaging capabilities and unified communications enhancements.
Benefits
By providing a Microsoft Unified Communications solution that includes instant messaging, enterprise voice, and Web conferencing capabilities, INEGI has provided a security-enhanced solution to improve communication for employees, while reducing the burden for its IT department. It has also established a foundation for providing more advanced communication technologies as the organization grows.
Eased Sharing ofInformation
Improved communications capabilities have made it much easier for INEGI to deliver on its main objective of gathering and organizing information. At the end of May 2010, INEGI will have an additional 100,000 workers in the field collecting data for the national census. “We will go from 18,000 to 180,000 employees,” says Armando Zuñiga, Systems and Communications Director at INEGI. INEGI will depend on the Microsoft unified communications solution to deliver plans and updated instructions to office managers throughout the country.
Better Level of Service
to More Users
Through unifying all of its communication channels using a Microsoft solution, INEGI is better able to provide advanced communications capabilities to all of its users. They are now able to give users access to a common platform for instant messaging, conferencing, voice mail, and mobile computing. Because it now centrally manages all of its communications software, security is improved and the costs of management and support are reduced. “With Unified Communications, we wanted to provide a better level of service, more reliable service, to employees already using instant messaging and VoIP to communicate. We also wanted to provide these services to a wider range of users,” explains Zuñiga.
Established Foundation for
Advanced Communications
By deploying Office Communications Server capabilities such as enterprise voice, INEGI was able to establish a foundation for improving its communications infrastructure as it retires older equipment. “With a Unified Communications solution from Microsoft, it’s easier for us to deliver secured communication services even over the Internet,” explains Carlos Camacho, Department Manager for IT operations and Logistics at INEGI. “We now have the flexibility to retire our PBX systems, which will help us reduce costs in the long term.”
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