Kicking off your enterprise future

Football season is kicking off and that’s a big reason to celebrate here in Lumen’s Pacific Northwest region. We are long-term technology partners with the Seattle Seahawks. The Seahawks leverage Lumen technology to create an awesome fan experience.

I’ll be at Lumen Field for the Seahawks season opener against the Denver Broncos on September 12. It’ll be a great day. I’ll cheer on the home team and also host the Seattle chapter of InspireCIO. The following day, Lumen executives will assemble for our annual Customer Advisory Board meeting here in the great northwest.

Our regional boundaries extend to British Columbia and into Alaska, as well as Oregon and Washington state. I was born and bred here. The word “diversity” comes to mind when I think about this area. We have different landscapes and cultures all mixing together. At Lumen, we’re proud to support the spirit of diversity in our business, championing the many viewpoints, life experiences and voices of our people around the globe. It’s our greatest strength as an organization and helps us field one of the strongest teams in technology.

We support diversity externally as well. The Great Northwest is a diverse market with customers from industries such as retail, healthcare, agriculture (including some wonderful wine-growing regions), and technology companies large and small.

Focus on people

I started enjoying the great outdoors at five years old when my parents started taking me skiing and camping. I’ve passed that passion to my own children. I’m part of this community and I’m proud to say that Lumen is as well.

We have a long history here and we have invested in this community for close to 100 years. We helped spin up pandemic testing sites when Seattle became one of the first hot spots. We’re also building out our 100-gigabit Metro 3.0 network architecture in the region. That will help connect firms across industries to their partners and their digital resources.

I tell my team to focus on people when they’re working with customers. The people are just as much a part of a corporate environment as their technology infrastructure. What do these people really need? What are their concerns? What are their aspirations? Our mantra is “it’s always about them.”

Every vertical industry has its own uniqueness. We study those market trends to build scouting reports on behalf of our customers. We also apply best practices from working across industries so no one has to reinvent a wheel that already exists. We help find every competitive advantage available.

How customers use technology is a huge part of their differentiation. They identify certain critical paths to growth they need to optimize. To help them think through how they might use data, analytics or other technologies to achieve that optimization, we huddle with other Lumen experts to join those discussions. As we map what we can do to support their needs, concerns and aspirations we can fill a new playbook with plans and ideas.

Not enough great people

With my team’s focus on people, it is ironic that one of the things I’m hearing most often from customers is that the talent shortage is real and impacting their ability to grow. There just aren’t enough great people to go around. That’s true in many functions, but most acute in IT.

Lumen Managed and Professional Services help fill those gaps. We can become part of your team through managed services. We can also architect automated solutions to drive execution speed and cost efficiency to relieve manual burdens. Think of Lumen as your offensive and defensive coordinators in one.

We’ve helped healthcare professionals shift to virtual care so they can serve more patients with the staff they have. We’ve helped virtually every customer advance their digital transformation plans and address security concerns as more and more of daily business and operations are done online, virtually, and remotely. Customers have crammed ten years of technology planning into the last two years.

The advent of football season is a tangible reminder that summer is over. We’re now talking about 2023 initiatives and beyond. Let’s get together and make a game plan.

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