You know, there would not be a discipline called ‘revenue assurance’ if it was not for the pioneers – those brave souls that walked straight ahead when others turned back. You cannot simultaneously blaze the trail whilst sticking with the crowd. We need the mavericks to find different, better ways of getting from A to B – of getting communication providers from where they are now to where they should be. That has always been part of the philosophy of talkRA; we give a few independently-minded individuals a platform so their voices can be distinguished from the chorus.

Of course, the problem with being a trail blazer is that you might not always get sufficient credit. By the time everyone else has caught up, nobody remembers who got there first. One example is David Smith of ABISQ. As the Technical Director of the Global Billing Association, David was an evangelist for revenue assurance before most people had even heard of the discipline. He systematically raised the profile of RA as he travelled the world. Because of David, the GBA introduced RA benchmarks that were years ahead of their time – in my opinion, the industry simply was not ready to capitalize on them. In 2001 David wrote Successfully Managing Revenue Assurance, which was the original blueprint for how to perform revenue assurance. Those of us fortunate to have read it can appreciate how well it has stood the test of time. His follow up work, Margin Management, is a lost classic. Through his efforts, David has had an incalculable impact on the growth of the discipline. Many of David’s ideas have become the mainstream of RA thinking. My guess is that his ideas influenced others around him, both consciously and subconsciously, until they had been repeated to the point where they became common wisdom. That is why I like to call David the godfather of revenue assurance… but only behind his back, because he is too modest to hear me talk that way in front him.

We need new thought leaders too, of course. It was a pleasure to find this new blog from a man who fittingly calls himself ‘Maverick’. Through his blog, the mysterious Maverick shares his thoughts on revenue assurance, revenue management, and a bit of everything else… but is too busy writing about those topics to share much about himself! Maverick says what he thinks, taking aim where he disagrees with conventional wisdom and walking his own path. Good for him. Perhaps, in a decade or so, if he keeps at it, the time will come to remind everyone what Maverick has contributed to the development of best practice…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.