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CASE STUDY I-3
The VoIP Adoption at Butler University
As CIO Kincaid looked back over the past 12 months, he
took pride in the fact that Butler University had taken a major
step forward with a network capability for the twenty-first
century—the convergence of its data and voice networks. Yet
the choices that had been made in the past year were not for
the “faint of heart”: his IT organization had taken on a lot
more in-house responsibility for voice communications than
in the past at a time in which network security risks were
heightened concerns. This also meant 24/7 visibility for the
telephony staff people who for the first time were working
alongside their data network counterparts.
Kincaid wondered: Did we make the right decisions?
Have we taken on too much?
IT at Butler University
Butler University is a private liberal arts college in
Indianapolis, Indiana. Founded in 1855 by attorney Ovid
Butler, the university was comprised of five colleges and
20 buildings on 290 acres, and a student enrollment of
4,400 students in 2005, the year it celebrated its 150th
anniversary. More than half of the enrolled students lived
on campus and depended on the university for network and
telephone services.
Butler’s Information Resources (IR) department
(see Exhibit 1) consists of 40 staff members that service
the technology needs of not only its students, but also
approximately 900 faculty and staff members. The CIO,
Scott Kincaid, reports to the president of the university;
formerly a CIO at a major financial services firm,
Kincaid was the first IT leader at Butler to be given the
CIO designation. Reporting to Kincaid are four directors
responsible for the university’s IT services: Network and
Systems, Administrative Computing, Web Applications
Development, and Instructional Technology. Part-time
student workers are employed in all four of these areas,
with an especially heavy dependence on students for help
desk and instructional lab support services.
Campuswide, the IT organization was responsible for
supporting over 125 servers, over 1,400 university-owned
desktops, and approximately 7,000 network connections.
Since 2001, the university’s administrative systems have
included PeopleSoft^1 ERP modules for Human Resources,
Finance, Campus Solutions (student administration), and
Enterprise Portal.
Prior to 2005, Butler had utilized SBC’s^2 Centrex serv-
ice to provide 3,000 phone stations, with most faculty and
staff having basic single-line analog phones. The Centrex
system was an outsourced solution: essentially, all call
switching was handled by a local telephone provider (SBC),
rather than by a university-owned system, and Butler paid for
the services on a monthly basis. Over the past decade, the
SBC Centrex system had been very reliable, but it lacked
more modern functions, such as intelligent call queuing.
Voice mail was provided by a Centigram 640 system that
provided a single voice mailbox to each dorm room, which
meant that students had to share both their phone number and
voice-mail box with their roommates.
The outsourcing arrangement enabled the university to
avoid the costs of ownership and the day-to-day management
of the communications equipment that would be required if it
had implemented its own private branch exchange (PBX).
While very reliable, the Centrex system was based on
features over a decade old, and was not easily customizable.
It had therefore become an impediment to implementing
customer call center service features, such as advanced call
routings. As departments grew and personnel changed,
moving phones and phone lines was a labor-intensive
process. SBC’s billing system was antiquated, prone to error,
and required constant reconciliation efforts by Butler’s
telecom coordinator.
Since Centrex was only partially meeting Butler’s
needs, Information Resources had begun researching the
telephony landscape in early 2004. Many vendors and
many trade magazines were predicting that an in-house
PBX would be more cost-effective than the outsourced
Centrex system for telephone services. Butler could
acquire and control its own system and then customize it
accordingly. Even more intriguing was a newer alternative
that would bring voice communications onto the sameCopyright © 2007 by Carol V. Brown, Associate Professor of IS at
the Kelley School of Indiana University–Bloomington and Scott A. Kincaid,
CIO, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, with research assistance by
Tony Easterlin and John Sacco, MSIS students at Indiana University.
(^1) PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle in January 2005.
(^2) SBC was formed through the mergers of Ameritech, Southwestern Bell,
and Pacific Telesis. SBC purchased AT&T Corp in 2005 and took the
name AT&T inc. They then merged with Bellsouth in 2006 and consoli-
dated ownership of Cingular, all under the AT&T name.