JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. -- Like the CD players and VCRs of yesterday, a human voice for Joint Base Lewis-McChord's base operator (967-1110) has gone away, and overall service from Network Enterprise Center is better for it said Everett Armistad, JBLM NEC's Logistics Support Branch chief.
Armistad said a couple of years ago an automated system changed to one with operators from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was manned by NEC, then known as the Directorate of Information Management, or DOIM, for the former Fort Lewis community.
"The old automated system was very antiquated," Armistad said, "it was clumsy and the lack of ability to get updates for it made it not up to snuff. At that time the garrison command said they wanted 'a voice,' they wanted people, so we did that." Soon with as many as five operators fielding more than 700 calls per day, working off of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that were updated piecemeal by the operators themselves. "The man hours involved in keeping just one listing... just one number, was lengthy," Armistad, who supervised the operators, said.
"Another difficulty we had was the units out here weren't getting us the information we needed. There were a lot of units who made it their business to get updated information to us consistently and without asking, but there were also others for whom it'd never cross their mind."
Not only were main numbers listed, but directories used to break down to every phone on Fort Lewis (now JBLM,) making accuracy that much more difficult. During this period, the Army realigned garrison DOIMs to become NECs, so where IT service on post (then Fort Lewis) used to be a direct garrison product, it now became the product of the 7th Signal Command out of Fort Gordon, Ga. Not too long after, joint basing became a reality and Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base had to link their "phone switches" together so that all calls were coming through either system, with Lewis' NEC shouldering the load. So now with a new agreement between JBLM NEC, with input from garrison command, and their parent command, along with a new reality in terms of technology, NEC relieved its operator team and moved to an updated and more efficient automated system approximately two months ago. All operators from the short-lived live directory have since either retired or have moved on to other teams within NEC. While Armistad said he figures every person in the JBLM community will never be pleased with the move, he feels that NEC is better serving its customers because of it. "In my book it's more efficient," he said, "but you'll always have folks out there who are what you'd call 'old school' because they want to talk to a person. This saves us man hours in many different ways -- we no longer have to have people watching telephones, so that releases them to do other jobs.
"People may think because we're NEC, we have the most current information for every phone number. Yes, while we may know every 'government number' on this installation, we don't know who answers every phone, and the operators wouldn't have known who answered every phone. The automated system only lists the numbers to pertinent positions in any organization."
Change is never easy. Some may keep their CDs tucked away, while others will roll with five hundred CDs worth of music crammed into a device the size of their thumbs. Some may wait to find their favorite movie on VHS at a yard sale, while others will stream it off of Netflix with two clicks of their mouse.
NEC continues to leave the CDs and VCRs behind in favor of "high-def" overall service to JBLM with their automated directory assistance at 967-1110 or www.lewis-mcchord.army.mil/inc/JBLM-Phonebook2011.pdf.