Olmsted County Telecom Consortium

The Telecommunications Consortium was looking to have a technology and financial analysis to determine the Consortium’s roadmap for the future of the telecommunications environment. The Telecommunications Consortium has been in existence for over 30 years and has provided Centrex and now Avaya Voice services to its members. The conversion from Centrex to Avaya occurred approximately 10-12 years ago and was the current system shared across the three networks to the current project resulting in the award of three distinct cloud/hosted solutions. This Consortium has three members: Olmsted County, City of Rochester and the Rochester School System. The scope was all accomplished despite the pandemic impacts on labor, supply chain and unrest.

Phase 1 - Discovery and focus group sessions to determine if the current voice communications system and associated costs which are shared across 3 different networks (Olmsted County, The City of Rochester, and Rochester School System) and was purchased through the Telecommunications Consortium should continue into the future or if all three entities should follow different solutions. TMC laid out three scenarios of potential roadmaps on how the Consortium could move forward with the result of three distinct systems. It is worth mentioning that these scenarios are not mutually exclusive – each of the entities could independently choose any of the solutions, irrespective of what the other two entities chose to do.

Phase 2 - This phase included full discovery and interviews with key groups, detailed design, creation of three distinct RFPs, coordination with the three Purchasing Departments for release, RFP/purchasing process and award of three distinct cloud/hosted solutions. Upon award, TMC implemented, in conjunction with the IT Departments and awarded vendors for the City of Rochester and Rochester Public Schools and was available for consultation on an as needed basis for Olmsted County which had a most robust IT Dept.