A User-Centric Approach to Revenue Assurance

A couple years ago, Revenue Assurance was the hottest thing. Carriers understandably jumped on any opportunity to seemingly recover millions of dollars in unbilled revenue. The problem was the vendors selling Revenue Assurance solutions either did not realize or neglected to inform the carriers that, while their tools certainly facilitate the identification of Revenue Assurance issues, it’s really up to the carrier to resolve the issues. RA tools are great at identifying billing discrepancies, prioritizing them and recommending resolution workflow. What they don’t do is the necessary final research into their validity and system updates that fix the issues. Unless the carriers invest the time and resources to do this, their RA successes will be dubious. I posit that this is perhaps why RA hasn’t been the sure thing revenue builder it was once thought to be.

If the problem is that carriers don’t have the time and resources, what can be done to address this? What about an RA solution that is ad-hoc and user-driven rather than a back office audit of thousands of discrepancies? Instead of treating RA as effectively an ETL “bashing” of millions of rows of data from multiple systems at once, why not take the Business Intelligence approach of providing users with visibility into a consolidated picture of the underlying data sources, errors and all? That way, the identification and correction of discrepancies can be integrated into the core processes of the users who know the data best and rely on it to be accurate in the first place. You could even take this a step further and incorporate SOA so that the interfaces used to view this consolidated data can be leveraged by not only users but systems across the entire enterprise that need access to shared data and perhaps have the resources to fix the problem, one discrepancy at a time.

Network Neutrality: Dick's Last Resort?

On January 11th, I attended the Denver Telecom Professionals Putting Network Neutrality In Perspective conference. The highlight was the keynote presentation from Dick Notebaert, CEO of Qwest Communications. Regardless of what side of the argument one is on, Dick’s passion and clear articulation of the issues might have been enough to sway people to his side.

Dick’s three main arguments against net neutrality were:

• There is no problem from which to derive a solution around Network Neutrality
• Telcos must be given a chance to make a return on their capital investment
• Telcos are not in the business of making service worse, they are in the business of improving it

The most interesting part of his presentation was what the concept of neutrality might mean in terms of automobiles, iPods and football. While these were a bit of stretch, his exaggeration served its purpose of making the point that differentiation is crucial in order to be successful.

BPM: Did Someone Forget About the Data?

All the buzz these days is about Business Process Management (BPM). Here we have yet another 3-letter acronym for a concept that goes back many years for modeling, automating and monitoring processes to improve operational efficiencies. The twist now is packages which allow you to manage processes independent of the underlying technology “plumbing”. The vendors of these tools would like you to think all the failures of the past can be summed up in these technology complexities (remember EAI?). While certainly decoupling processes from technology makes it easier for business users to participate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Without accurate data, operational processes will always be “garbage in, garbage out”. Ask the same business users what their biggest process headaches are and I’ll think you’ll be surprised.

I recently led a data architecture assessment for a telecommunications service provider that has made several acquisitions over the last few years. Understandably, this provider is worried about having a consistent set of processes to follow for ordering and delivering service. They have implemented business process management solutions in the past that have met with varying results.

The results of the data assessment gave a clear indication that two of the largest issues this service provider faced were having too many sources of record for the same type of data (e.g. Customer, Location) as well as not having the proper controls in place to reconcile or consolidate the data. The consequence to process management was not figuring out how to better model, automate or monitor. Rather, the consequence was was where to go to look for the data and make sure it was accurate in the first place!

BPM has a tremendous value in modeling, automating and monitoring operational business process. When taken together with effective data and information management, you will have a better chance of actually reaping the benefits of it.