From The Top: John Gerdelman,
President, networkMCI Services

Internet Week
By Chuck Moozakis
September 14, 1998

John Gerdelman helped shape the Internet way before the Internet was cool. Gerdelman, president of the networkMCI Services unit of MCI, began developing MCI's intranet activities back in 1992, a full year before the World Wide Web was draped over the bare bones of the Internet.

"We began building an intranet in 1992 when I was CIO of the consumer division," Gerdelman says. "We saw the benefits growing out of having a tool where people could get information immediately, and I believe we were ahead of the curve."

Within the last six years, MCI has grown its intranet to offer its more than 50,000 employees a rich tapestry of information services. They cover a wide range of business operations-including a comprehensive human resources application dubbed The Source, and an employee research, news and information package called MCI Library.

In addition, two other applications, networkMCI Click'nConnect and networkMCI Contact, are also used to link MCI's employees. Click'nConnect lets Web users make a PC-to-phone connection over the Internet, while Contact lets users manage paging, E-mail, voice mail and fax through a single conduit.

Finally, MCI also is offering Web-based training. Its networkMCI University offers more than 70 different courses-featuring video, audio and text-to more than 3,000 users. The training classes are tailored to the vendor's 10,000-member sales force and feature introductory and advanced courses in technology and applications.

The end result is a collection of offerings designed to give MCI employees immediate access to data ranging from how much money they want to earmark for their 401(k) contributions to obtaining the latest information about new services tailored to MCI customers.

At the same time, MCI's reliance on intranet communications forced substantial changes within its own infrastructure, Gerdelman says. For one, "we forced connectivity all the way to the user's PC. Without that [level of user interface], none of this does any good," he says. Second, MCI had to upgrade its internal security operations. "The advent of the Internet forced us to shore up the entire enterprise to make sure security levels are maintained. All it would take is for one person to see something he or she wasn't supposed to."

MCI projects that its intranet activities have saved the company a hefty sum-more than $111 million in printing and distribution, reporting and travel costs over the past six years. Today, the network consists of 1,000 servers in 500 geographic locations, with more than 70,000 workstations connected to 3,000 LAN segments, and 1,500 routers that connect to 155-Mbps ATM backbone switches.

For the future, Gerdelman anticipates streamlining MCI's intranet activities while at the same time increasing the number of offerings provided to employees. The intranet also will become a potent tool supporting MCI's forthcoming merger with WorldCom.

And the network won't just continue to funnel necessary business information to internal employees. The company expects to sell its intranet knowledge to other customers, packaging its services and tailoring them to meet the demands of firms interested in developing their own internal networks. ý

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From The Top: John Gerdelman, President, networkMCI Services

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