The Evil of the Urge to Merge I t appears that almost every time you pick up a trade paper, newspaper or turn on the TV news you can expect to read or view information about another proposed communications takeover. In the past year we witnessed the merger of Worldcom with MCI, Bell Atlantic with Nynex, and a number of proposed mergers between AT&T, TCI, Bell Atlantic, GTE, and other communications-oriented firms. While the results of such mergers will take many years to access, one thing is crystal clear -the effect on the customer is the last thing most merging organizations consider.
As a consultant to a large number of communications end-user organizations, the deterioration in service resulting from pre-merger, merger, and post-merger activity has been nothing short of horrendous. Customers have watched repair time rise like a tidal wave while the number of experienced personnel that were capable of rectifying problems dwindled since age and experience typically represent the upper range of personnel salary. It is a rather sad situation to watch organizations in a pre-merger moment of madness offer buyouts under the threat of layoffs to remove experienced and highly compensated employees from their payroll to be replaced by wet-behind-the-ears but lower-compensated recent trade school and college graduates. While I have no hidden agenda against recent trade school and college graduates since we all must start work as relative novices in our chosen profession, the results of actions by communications organizations to enhance their bottom line results in illogical provisioning of services that takes weeks to correct as well as opens trouble tickets that sometimes last for weeks instead of hours.
Just recently one organization I was assisting ordered a non-channelized T1 circuit to be installed between their central office and a regional office to enable T1 multiplexers to be used to allocate the 1.536 Mbps of available bandwidth. The order required an installation within 60 days which was not an unreasonable request based upon the two locations to be interconnected. Unfortunately, one new engineer provisioned one end of the circuit as a channelized T1 while the other end of the circuit was provisioned as a non-channelized T1. Apparently experienced employees in the quality assurance department had long since taken early retirements as the provisioning passed through that department in a manner similar to Grant moving through Georgia. When communications vendor employees showed up at each site they proceeded to install incompatible T1 local loops and left the premises without bothering to attempt to perform an end-to-end test which, if conducted, would have indicated that something was amiss.
Although I also have no hidden agenda against corporate mergers I do oppose such activities as 'encouraging' older workers to take early retirement or face potential layoffs as a mechanism to enhance the corporate bottom line. Not only is this wrong from the customer standpoint, but it is also wrong from a moral standpoint.